Creating Acapellas

[deadxbeat]

I like to incorporate bits & pieces of raps into my beats but with youtube im really limited as to the kinds of acapellas I can collect.

Is there a quick and simple way I can turn any rap into an acapella?

 

[M.W.P.]

I don't think so, but most singles come with acapellas.

 

[MetronomeAUDiLE]

We'll, I know of a method that I used w/ Ableton Live 8. It usually serves no problem if I can find what I need. Phase Cancellation and Subtractive EQ'ing. usually what I would do w/ hip hop is find the original instrumental of the track; no remakes, unless it is literally SPOT ON. It has to have the exact BPM as the original and everything for this to work. Take both the instrumental and the original soundtrack into Ableton, and put them on separate tracks. Now you need to zoom in, and make sure that they are completely synced together throughout the entire track, which is why it is essential for them to have the exact BPM or this portion would be messy. Once they are in sync, grab a Utility device and place it onto the instrumental only track. On the bottom of the device you should see two buttons that say "Phz-L" and "Phz-R" click both of them and they should be yellow now. Nothing else should be touched on the Utility device besides those. Now play the track and you should hear a clean acapella and usually a little bit of the beat should leak in too, that is normal depending on the mastering process. If these are too prominent, you can now export your acapella and put it back into a fresh project and throw an EQ on it. Ableton's EQ has a unique feature that I absolutely love for this exact technique which would be considered subtractive EQ'ing. Towards the bottom there should be a button that says "Mode" and is on the function "Stereo" as it is default. Take that and drop it down to "M\S" and then make sure it's on "S". This essentially means, mono and stereo channels. The stereo channel is everything that is panned to the left or right of your mix, mono would be everything in the middle. Now considering how most hip hop vocals are mixed, they are more then likely always going to be live in that middle area. Anything else in the instrumental that leaks through would be on the stereo channel. So using this method, switch back and forth between those and EQ to your advantage and find and subtract as much of that instrumental as you possibly can without distorting or messing up the vocals. Once this is finished, what I like to do is apply some reverb on to the final scrub of the vocals to kind of dull it out a bit so that whatever is left isn't really prominent in the final mix. It gives it more of a natural sound then dry vocals, especially since you've probably EQ'd all of the prior reverb that it had in the original mix out.

I hope this method helps you if you have Ableton Live. But w/ any other DAW I don't think I could help you, so you can try resorting to VST's. Phase cancellation works by pretty much reversing the polarity of the instrumental and then mixing it within the original soundtrack so your product is whatever is left (in this case, a clean vocal acapella). I'd like to think of it is a filter that subtract's accordingly for the frequencies I provide it w/ in a specific waveform and it is extremely useful if you know what you're doing.

 

[SoulGhost]

creating acapellas - YouTube

Peace

 

[Mister F]

if you have the instrumental for said rap song, and they're the same bitrate, if you reverse the wave (or something like that) on the instrumental, it will cancel out the music therefore leaving only the acapella(when both tracks are played together)... there are certainly tutorials out there explaining it better than i can, search for extracting acapellas or something...

 

[bandcoach]

you invert the polarity on one of the two files and then combine them - this only works if they are exactly the same length and bit depth and sample rate - if any of these fail that test then all bets are off

 

[SOFTPORECORN]

You can try.. but more times than not they're going to sound like this at best

Going to sound weird... maybe throw on a bunch of reverb and some phasers and just run with that crazy sound lol