Do you know of any software that erases certain tracts of a song (eg instruments), leaving, for example, the voice tract? The idea is to take, for instance, Neil Young's Old Man, run it thru a program that erases all exept his voice tract, thereby allowing me to play along with his voice tract, rather than the whole song.
Thanks.
What youre asking for is practically impossible. To seperate tonal apects of a mastered track you would need to divide the different frequencies and eliminate the ones which are unrelated to the voice. If you look at frequency response from editing software it is not uncommon to see registers from all acommpanyment to be similar to the vocal track which would either take away from the original vocals or remove them completely as well.
Unless you could get ahold of the original master of the peice your looking for on the exact same equipment with the exact same format you would have quite the task ahead of you. Isoloating an already blended mix isnt worth your time.
There are play along tracks associated with alot of different styles of music where different parts of the song are panned to different sides in stereo, allowing you to solo or play rythm at your whim. It is very unlikely they would make something like that for "Old Man" but discount my opinion because I wouldnt really know.
Kido
There is a trick, which is used by the so-called voice remover programs. A stereo song track has, basically, three components - the outside left track, the "centre" voice track and the outside right track. The "centre" voice track is really the same piece recorded on both the left and right tracks - so to "remove" the voice, the software takes evrything away that is the same on both right and left tracks. It does remove a large proportion of the voice, but parts of the music as well (if it works at all - some recordings simply are not recognised by the voice remover). It would not be hard to swap the functionality and "remove" the backing and leave the voice - but I don't know of any software that does it.
Sorry.
I started with nothing - and I've still got most of it left.
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About the only way to do it is as greybeard suggested. Look around to see if you can find a backing track (called a minus one) that doesn't include guitars or whatever.
What you could do is look around on the internet to see if anyone's made a midi version of whichever song. Then, open it up in midi editing software (a great freeware one is Quartz Audio Master). Then simply delete whichever part, and export the file to a .wav and put it one CD.
It wouldn't be much like playing along to the original, but might be worth a try.
Peter
