How to Make Vocals From Songs Louder and Instrumentals Lower

If you record the song yourself, you can raise and lower the sound of the instrumentals and vocals.

To edit instrumentals and the vocals on a recorded piece of music, you should have them on separate files. Then you can record the sounds separately and edit them before splicing them together with an audio editing program. For already recorded songs, deleting vocals from an instrumental is much easier than deleting instrumentals from vocals. When you cannot separate the vocals, any attempt to raise the vocal volume also raises the instrumental volume. There is one technique that may or may not work and can potentially ruin the quality of the vocals.

Original Source

If you are not using a song already recorded, record the instrumentals and the vocals separately. Use a microphone connected to a computer that has a recording program, such as Audacity. If you are using one song, simply make note of where the file is located in your hard drive.

Editing Program

Load both the vocals and instrumentals to the audio editing program, if you recorded them separately. If you only have one file, open it by itself in the editing program. Make sure the program has a feature that lets you remove the vocals from the song and also lets you subtract one audio from another. A subtraction feature takes the sounds in one recording and makes sure that they are not also in the other recording. This allows you to remove the instrumentals.

Separation

Determine the feature that allows you to remove vocals. In Audacity, click the title bar, which has the name of the song and an arrow pointing down. Find and select “split stereo track.” This will create two tracks. Go to “Effect” in the top menus and click “Invert.” Go to the title bar of each new track and select “mono.” Press “Play” to listen to the song and assess the sound quality. Save the file as “instrumentals.” Import the old version of the song, and adjust the tracks with the time shift tool until they are aligned. Highlight either track and repeat the invert effect. Click “Tracks” and select “Mix and Render,” then press “Play” and listen to make sure the instrumentals were successfully removed. Save as “vocals”

Adjustment

Locate the function for raising or lowering the volume on the music. In Audacity, it is the vertical slider to the left of the waveform. Press “play” and listen to the new version and make adjustments to the volume slider until you are happy with the results. Make adjustments until you like how it sounds. Export the project to an mp3. This will allow you to listen to the song on an mp3 player, send it to a friend or burn it to a CD.

Warning

When saving the vocal-free version of the recorded song, do not save the non-vocal song under the same file name as the original song or the computer will write over the old version. This will prevent you from subtracting the new song from the old song. In some cases, vocals cannot be removed and the file you save will simply be a lesser quality version of the original song.

References

• Trinity College: How to Extract Instrumental Version of a Song (Audacity)