What? How? (Splitting vocals from music)

Recordings you hear have different instruments placed at different places in the stereo mix, ie, the rhythm guitar might be louder on the left and the lead louder on the right, so that they sound like they are coming from different places. It helps make the sounds distinct and is just 'cool' as a general principle :wink:

Vocals are nearly always placed dead centre, probably 90% of the time or so, so that the vocals seem to be coming from right in front of you. Now, because it's dead centre, the signal on both sides is exactly the same, whereas things that are panned left or right will have a different signal on each side. If you invert the waveform of one side and play both sides back, the original signal of the vocals on one side and the inverted signal on the other cancel each other out and the vocals disappear (the 'phase cancellation' they mention). Anything that was dead centre disappears, anything panned completely to one side is completely unharmed, and anything panned but not fully is left there, but sounds a bit funny. Tinny and feeble, usually. In practice you can normally still hear a little of the vocals, or effects on the vocals, due to various things.

Vocal removal/kareoke software just does all this automatically for you.

Ha. That's a cool little trick.

Thanks and- Well explained.

Remember, "anything that was dead centre disappears". That very often means bass, also. The loss of the bass frequencies might account for the "tinny and feeble" sound Misanthrope refers too.