Hello, I'm Wingbeat Pony.
Today, I'll be showing you how I do the Vocal-free MLP project, plus a few other ways to remove vocals.
We'll be working in Audacity, so open it up and bring in your audio.
Now, if you ripped the audio out of an .AVI or off of YouTube, you'll probably be looking at a stereo track like this.
Applebloom: Today's the day, cutie mark crusaders! I can just feel it!
Audacity has a one-step process to remove vocals from a stereo track. Look in Effects, and you should find "Remove Center-Panned Vocals."
The result sounds something like this.
Terrible, right? Why's it suddenly mono? Well, let me show you what just happened by doing it manually.
Vocals tend to be recorded in mono, while the music is in stereo, so only the vocals are exactly the same volume in both the left and right channels.
So, if one side gets subtracted from the other, only the mono part gets cancelled out.
That's why I've split the stereo track into two mono tracks: So they can be subtracted.
To do that, one side has to get inverted. This flips the waveform upside down, so adding them together results in zero. Make sense?
If we listen to the result, it's exactly the same as before.
So how do I do it in stereo? How do I get voices removed when they're not perfectly centered?
To start with, I don't use a 2-channel stereo track. Instead, I use the Dolby 5.1 surround audio as my source.
You can get that by buying the episodes on iTunes.
BUY THE EPISODES ON ITUNES.
Then demux the audio, something I won't go over in this tutorial, but you should be able to find out how elsewhere on the Internet.
Anyway, open it up, and we get this. Six audio tracks, all helpfully unlabelled.
See track 3? It's a lot louder and busier than the other tracks, and you can be sure that's where the vocals are. Mute it and hit play to make sure.
Now, let's re-label these tracks and put them in the proper channels.
The first two are left and right, followed by center and bass (which stay mono).
Then there's left and right surround. Just put them on left and right.
Now, I could just mute the center channel, but I'll want it for editing later.
So invert it...
...and duplicate the track.
Rename the tracks as "Left Vox" and "Right Vox." Also, take the envelope tool (that's the blue one) and drag the envelopes down to zero to mute them.
90% of our work is done. Give it a listen.
Now, occasionally a character will say something and the audio won't be perfectly in the center, for instance when they're walking accross the screen like Zecora here.
Zecora: ...I have just the trick, that will fix you up quite quick.
Thankfully, the audio is rarely panned all the way to one side or the other. That means there's still a little audio left in the center we can use to cancel it out.
Drag the envelope for the appropriate channel back out, and you'll hear the voices get a little quieter.
[Quieter] Zecora: ...I have just the trick... fix you up quite quick.
It's not perfect, and that's because the panning is changing through this line. Play around with the envelope until you can't hear it at all.
This is the end result...
That's it! Now, there's still a little trace of the line due to the fact that I can't match the envelope perfectly, but it's a far cry from not being able to remove it at all.
There are other artifacts, like reverb in indoor scenes and BOOMING, ECHOING VOICES that I really can't remove.
The reason for that is that they're offset a little in the stereo mix, so they can't be lined up with the center channel.
It's bad news for me, but evidence of stellar sound mixing on behalf of the creators of the show.
Thanks for watching, and I hope you stick around to watch more Vocal-free MLP!