alternative acapellas

[djcham]

I'm trying to do a remix for alternative songs..

anybody know where I can download acapellas for alternative songs? There's a bunch of hip hop acapellas out there but i don't know...are they on P2P servers or is there a website to get it..thanks!

[automyskin89]

there is one of Lindsay Lohan's "Rumors" that I really want!!

[🅳🅸🆂🅲🅾]

I'm not endorsing this program, but WinMX is an okay program. It's small, and uses very few resources. And it does not have spyware adware that messes up your computer. This is sort of a P2P program, but when you install you can check the option that unshares your music folder or any other folder.

There are a bunch of forums out there that claim to offer acapellas. They seem a bit iffy. They ask for a whole lot of information that you probably don't want to give out because you want songs.

Or, if you really want to, check out this site that instructs you on how to create your own acapellas from the original versions. It won't let me link to it so here is how to do it.


how to make an acapella out of the original plus the instrumental version, read more...

ACAPELLA 'CREATION' (edited from dsico's tutorial)

You want an acapella of a track but you just can't find one anywhere. Why not do it yourself? there is a simple trick that you can try if there is an instrumental version of the same track released.

Step 1 : Instrumental Version
Find an instrumental version of the track. CD Singles are the best source, as the digital recording & pressing techniques are more likely to give a perfect copy of the backing track, which is something that you need. Mp3s are not likely to give good results as the compression method removes some of the audio data that may be required. Recording from vinyl may work if you do both recordings under exactly the same conditions (any pitch variation will reduce the effectiveness of this technique). Just rip the audio tracks to wav files, or another uncompressed format, .AIF etc, using an Audio Extracter/Ripper.
The basic idea relies on the linear superposition of audio. Which is simply: that if you have take a sound, any sound at all, and add it to the inverted version of itself the result will be silence.

Note: Occasionally the instrumental on the CD Single will have a slightly different arrangement or structure. basically you are screwed in this case. (it won't be this simple but you may be able to salvage something). A rough guide when you're considering buying that CD single is "Are the two tracks exactly the same length?" if they are, then there is a good chance the engineer just muted the vocal track when they did the instrumental, which could result in a nice clean acapella.

Step 2: Matching Them Up
Now that you have the Instrumental Version its a matter of matching the two songs exactly. i.e. to the sample. The best thing for this is a wave editor like Soundforge, Peak, Cooledit,......etc




u can see these two look pretty close except for the vocal sections. Thats a good start. By zooming in on the first beat of the Radio Version you get a better picture of the shape of the waveform. You want to find a distinctive little waveshape that you can then look for in the instrumental (or vice versa). for example I just focused on this little click at the begining of the track:

Find a Distinctive Waveform Shape




After you find the same section in the second track you can start trying to line them up so that the spikes fall on EXACTLY the same sample position. Personally I just delete sections from the beginning of either until the sample no. readout of the spikes is exactly the same. This makes it much easier to do the "paste mix" later.

Match Up the Two Tracks



Step 3 : Mix 'Em Together
The rest is rather simple, just invert one of the tracks, say the instrumental, ("Select All" then apply an "Invert Waveform" function or similar) and mix the inverted instrumental with the original aligned radio version the result may be a pretty clean acapella.
to Mix the two:
In Soundforge I just select the entire song (try and find a "Select All" command). Now copy that into the clipboard. ie just Copy it. ("Ctrl + C" or "Option + C"). Select the other version from the begining of the track and PASTE MIX or similar type function. You may need to fiddle with the repective volumes of the two as there may be differences in the mastered loudness. Thats about it. The idea is that now that they are aligned it is very easy to do a paste mix where the two waveforms will fall directly on top of each other (but inverted) and hence cancel out. This will leave only the difference between the two (the vocal)

Although there will most likely still be some resembalance of drums and stuff through into the acapella, This is probably due to post production mastering differences (multiband compression, maximising reverb etc..) between the Instrumental version and the radio edit. I've also noticed there is often some nasty digital noise, its low in the mix but you can hear it in the straight acapella, I've been curious as to why that is there, and well I don't know. It could be due to dither (which is the process of purposefully adding noise to digital recordings) as it should be random each time so it won't cancel out.




As you can see its a pretty simple process. But its the only way to get a reasonably clean and good quality vocal from a full mixed track. Just a couple of notes on some other rumoured methods of creating acapellas:

1. EQ out the Backing: I've heard people talk about EQing the backing track out of the mix, utter bulls**t. It can't be done without destroying the vocal as well. The tonal range of the human voice is also within the range of most musical instruments it will never work.

2. Karaoke Versions: There was an old school method to create a vocal free version of a song. Which relied on the notion that the left and right channels of most instruments are well out of phase however the vocal as it is mono and mixed center is not. Thus mixing say, the right channel with an inverted left will result in a vocal free version. This will give you an "instrumental" or a rough one. You can not use that in this process: some simple algebra will explain why it will not work.

A little EQ afterwards will help clean it up and maybe a touch of multiband compression to emphasis the vocal and add some dynamic noise reduction. Otherwise you could be sweet.


FINDING THE BPM OF AN ACAPELLA

damo's method:
What i do is try to find a part of the pella where it loops slightly and just select the 4 or 8 beats where it loops in sound forge. Then goto the edit tempo section and tell sound forge that there are 4beats or however many there are in the selection. It will then give u a rough guide for the rest of the pella. i would then chop the pella into the parts i want and import into my chosen sequencer, from there u might have to do a little editing but it minimises wasted time.

Loopfish's method:
1. I drop the whole acapella/track into Cubase
2. I make a guess at what the tempo is, and then set Cubase's tempo accordingly.
3. I play Cubase with the Metronome on, and listen to how the acapella/track stays in time.
(I may need to move the start of the acapella/track so that it falls on a beat)
4. If the acapella/track drifts out of time, I adjust Cubase's tempo until it stays in time as much as possible.
(If the acapella/track is recorded off vinyl, or was originally not recorded to a metronome, then I often have to cut the acapella/track up into smaller sections, which are then easier to reposition, tweak, and timestretch.

Lpfan7689:
the way i found very effective was downloading hammerhead. I put a simple beat in and set the tempo on it. I got cool edit pro and put the marker on the first beat in the acapella. I played the beat off hammerhead and sync.'ed it with the acapella. I fiddled around with the tempo in hammerhead until it was right. May not always work tho but it can be very helpful.

General tips:

DJ Toast:
it's helpful to listen very carefully to the original non-acapella version if the rhythm is at all complicated: i heard a horrible bootleg of eminem "without me" with a smiths track which had failed to realise where the beat should be: so instead of

na na na NA na, (the phrase is an anacrusis) it went
NA na na na na -all wrong!

It's worth preserving a little sway in timing if the thing stays in time as a whole. Again, with the eminem acapella there are bits which sound like they drift out of time a bit, but if the producers earning the big bucks at his record company think that's artistic expression, and didn't tidy it up, who are we to argue?

another small point: time stretching often works better speeding up than slowing down, because it's not having to invent information it doesn't have, just discard samples it doesn't need, so if it fits in with what you're doing i'd aim to work to the speed of the fastest sample and speed other bits up to match, rather than the other way around. having said that, it also depends a lot on what the sounds are: snare drum sounds, for example, always sound terrible time-stretched slower. If you're only changing speed a bit, it's sometimes even altering the speed WITHOUT preserving the pitch for this reason.

one simple (if not very technical) way of getting a BPM is to look at your watch and count how many beats there are in a minute! (or half a minute, or 15 seconds...) or indeed with a stopwatch time one bar and divide 240 by the result, eg if four beats takes 2.00 seconds, the record is 120 BPM! Not very technical, but more reliable than any bpm counter, particularly for complicated rhythms in RnB or DnB.

source: tutorial-heaven.com

[DJ Amokk]

The Lindsay Lohan one isn't an acapella.. its a "Sharp-A-Pella"  its just the vocals to the remix... it's 6 minutes long and is faster and looped more than the original and in a different order.  And, it's not alternative! She's practically a drag queen.

[automyskin89]

DJ said:

The Lindsay Lohan one isn't an acapella.. its a "Sharp-A-Pella"  its just the vocals to the remix... it's 6 minutes long and is faster and looped more than the original and in a different order.  And, it's not alternative! She's practically a drag queen.

post it, PLEASE, + the sharp boy rumors remixes, + any over remixes you have.........lol, I think I've seen you say you have all of them (except for maybe "Over."

[djcham]

how did this thread turn from alternative acapellas to lindsey lohan!!! hahaha..there is a huge thread for that!! that was a great tutorial...thanks..

i'm still looking for acapellas though for alternative songs..e.g. oasis/greenday/ etc etc

sigh..too bad i d'on thave hookups in the industry..