Separating Vocals For Remixing Options

[Mr. Jason E. Lec...]

i have a song i am trying to clean up and remix for a friend of mine. his brother passed away and they have one recording of a song he wrote. it seems that it was simply a bedroom recording, but if it was multi-track, nobody knows, thus i don't have access to the separate tracks of vocals and instruments. i really want to help my friend and his family. so is there any way to somehow "bring out" the vocal tricks, or cut down the other tracks so i can achieve this?

[Jim Hoyland]

If you have a suitable plug-in, try making a copy of the whole song file, then flip the left and right sides of the copy (so that the left side plays out of the right speaker and the right side out of the left).

You then need to reverse the phase of the copy - in ProTools pretty much every Digirack plug-in has phase switches (usually represented by a circle with a diagonal line).

When you run the original track with the channel and phase reversed copy, phase cancellation should remove a fair amount of the backing track.

I believe this technique is similar to the process undertaken by 'karaoke' software to strip a lead vocal from a backing track and also the old engineers' trick of reversing phase on control room speakers so that singers can record without headphones.

Best of luck with your project!