Lesson 25

25. How to Remove Vocals from a Recording

Resource Type:

Tutorial Video

Duration:

3 minutes

Outcomes:

Learners are expected to:

SO 2.5.            use the mouse right-click "Open With…" function and the FILE-menu OPEN function to open an existing WAV or MP3 file

SO 2.6.            open an existing WAV or MP3 file by using the mouse drag-and-drop function and the FILE-menu IMPORT function

SO 2.7.            export an Audacity project as a WAV file

SO 2.8.            export an Audacity project as an MP3 file

SO 4.16.          remove the vocals from a recording

Suggested Evaluation:

If you choose to do this tutorial with students’ their success can be evaluated by observing if the vocals were removed from the test recording. It is suggested that, for the purposes of evaluation, each student use the same recording for this tutorial. Due to copyright regulations a piece of music cannot be suggested in this documentation.

Procedure:

Audacity has some functions that allow us to reduce or remove the vocals from an existing recording. Because every recording is unique, the process of removing vocals does not always work perfectly and for some recordings it does not work at all.

Be aware that removing the vocals from a piece of music that you do not own may violate some copyright regulations. Be careful not to misuse music that does not belong to you.

The first step to removing the vocals from a recording is to open the recording in Audacity. When you have the recording open in Audacity you need to verify that it is a stereo recording. If you are not sure how to tell the difference between stereo and mono recordings you can watch the tutorial on stereo and mono recordings in this series. This process will only work with stereo recordings. If you recording is mono this will not work.

On the left tab of your track click the pull-down menu and select SPLIT STEREO TRACK. This will create two separate tracks – one for the left channel and one for the right channel.

Next, select all the sound in ONE of the tracks. Go to the EFFECT menu and choose INVERT.

When Audacity finished processing the INVERT function you need to make each of your tracks MONO. To do this for each track you need to go to the pull-down menu found on each of the two tracks and select MONO. Again, this has to be done for both tracks.

Click PLAY and see if the process removed the vocals from the recording.