Is it possible to remove vocals from an existing track?

Well, the short answer is...Yes...and No. The simple reason for these opposite responses is that the process of 'vocal cutting' or 'vocal zapping' (as some say in radio) is a process that's been around for ages, known in many record engineering circles as "A minus B listening". What is that? Well, I've compiled some of our best reponses below to showcase what that is and how it's done.

The tip: If you're using a track from the 60s, 70s or even early 80s, you've probably got a decent shot of removing vocals. Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed" (1970), Astrud Gilberto's "Light My Fire" (1969), even Donald F.a.gen's "I.G.Y". and "Walk Between Raindrops" (1982) are four good examples to try out. But it's all to do with structure....

To do this in Audition simply highlight your file and go to Effect>Amplitude>Channel Mixer and select the VOCAL CUT preset. You can preview and toggle between NO MIXING and VOCAL CUT to hear what's happening. You can also alter the phase relationship between the L&R channels by dragging the sliders.

Now, because your resultant wave can sometimes suffer from center-channel dropouts of things like bass guitar and bass drum, here's something else that you can do 'after' you've run the vocal cut (ala, center-channel cut) preset on a file...

(this tip is easiest to achieve in multitrack, but could also be done with Mix Paste)

After using the Vocal Cut preset on your file, save it (with a new name) and hit Ctrl-M to insert the file into Multitrack.

Open the original file (pre-vocal cut) and run a low-pass filter on it so that ONLY frequencies below 200Hz pass thru (effectively cutting everything above 200Hz). This will leave you with a stereo waveform that has possibly 'some' vocal element, but will primarily carry the bass and bass frequencies.

Now, insert the 'low-pass' file into MT, aligning it with the vocal-cut version. Play with the volumes to achieve a proper balance. This will allow you to restore a bit of the stereo image (if needed) as well as improve some of the low-end response (if it suffered to begin with)...

Food for thought.

when we put this together you get this plan:

All these 'vocal cut applications work the same way. You can do it manually, using a wave editor such as Cool Edit or Audition, or you can rely on some other bit of kit which does all the steps automatically - but the end result is the same.

1 - Take a stereo file

2 - Invert the phase of one channel

3 - Add the two channels together

That's it - that's all you do. Now for what happens.

1 - Anything that was centre stage (hopefully, in this case, the vocal) will be cancelled out.

2 - This includes the bass, kick drum and anything else that was also centre stage.

3 - Material which is close, but not, centre stage will also reduce in level.

4 - The end file will be mono.

4 - On most modern recordings, FX returns are stereo or pseudo-stereo. Thus all the FX returns on the vocal will still be heard.

The truth of the matter is that you can, perhaps, on some recordings, reduce the vocal level. Whether or not you can reduce it enough is only discovered by trying it out. You will still have to contend with the problems of other instruments which also vanish, the generally reduced bass level and the FX returns.

However, the general answer is you will not be able to do this to any effective degree unless you are extremely lucky in your choice of original recording.