The Karaoke Forum

I am getting married in two weeks and I promised my fiancee that I would sing a certain song to her at our reception that an old college friend of mine wrote and recorded about ten years ago. We had lost touch, but I found him about a year ago and he told me after I got engaged that he had an instrumental track of that song without any vocals and that he would send it to me. A few weeks ago, he finally contacted me again and gave me the bad news that he could not find it after looking everywhere and that it was likely lost.

Now I am stuck. I don't have quite the voice that he has and I don't want to sing this song overtop of his existing vocals, but I WILL if I have to. Our wedding DJs said that they cannot help me. I went to the local Karaoke store and they wanted to sell me an Alesis Vocal Zapper for $100 and change.

I'm getting married in two weeks and EVERYTHING is budgeted almost to the penny. I was counting on Martin getting the instrumental track to me -- I just don't have that much extra cash and cannot spend that kind of money just to de-vocalize one song.

If I am violating the board's TOS with this post, then I will accept banishment or whatever the penalty is, but I have no place else to turn on such short notice and so I have to try to get some help here. I'VE BEEN PLANNING THIS THING FOR OVER A YEAR and made contact with my source well in advance of the wedding date, but now here I am in this bind. Does anyone out there have this Vocal Zapper device who would be willing to help a guy out for his wedding ?

I tried using Audacity software to remove the vocal track, but that failed miserably and only distorted the existing tracks. I tried searching online for an existing Karaoke version of this song, but it is so far from mainstream, that I knew I wouldn't find it (still tried anyway). I am OUT of options.

The song was written and performed by Martin Doman and is called: I am Here to Stay.

I am DESPERATE! Can anyone PLEASE help me? I can e-mail the full version of this song in an mp3 format if necessary. PLEASE tell me that this Vocal Zapper will do the trick and PLEASE tell me that someone out there can do this for me or put me in touch with someone else who can on very short notice.

You can extract the vocals somewhat...but you will find that you can still hear it slightly. It will sound slightly muffled. You'll need to try to remove the center track...

There are probably trial versions and cheaper programs availabe which I haven't used, do a search for "vocal remover"+"mp3"+"freeware" and you'll find various results.

If I am violating the board's TOS with this post, then I will accept banishment or whatever the penalty is...

Your type of question is what this forum is all about. I personally welcome you to the karaoke forum and will do what I can to help you out. I have some experience with removing vocals from song tracks. I should say however that satisfactory results are not achieved on the majority of songs. Send me the full version mp3 of the song (in a zip file), using the "Send a File" feature of this forum, to my webmaster@karaoke-tutor.com email address.

Thanks wiseguy! I sent the zip file earlier today to the e-mail you provided. I understand that these things are not an exact science and that the result may not be much better than the initial product, but at least the effort is there to clear it away. Even if the vocals are only muffled, anything that will help to maintain the music and diminish the vocals so that I can sing along with the music and the guests can hear both = an improvement.

I'm afraid that your sound track is one of those that is not a good candidate for vocal reduction. It all depends on how the track was originally mixed and recorded. I tried four software applications and two hardware vocal removers and all produced very poor results. The track I ended up with only slightly reduced the volume of the lead vocals. I have sent it to you.

Just a suggestion. Perhaps your friend Martin could record an acoustical guitar backing track of the song.

It has taken me a little while to get back to you. I DID get the revised sound file that you created and I knew that full vocal removal would be unlikely. I still wanted to write and tell you that I really appreciate your efforts. Thank you for taking the time to help me out. The wedding is ten days away and I am recovering from a cold, so I hope my voice and head clear up 100% by that day! I'm certain that everything will turn out perfectly! Thanks again!

wiseguy,
I send you two songs from scottgoldbergfilms@yahoo.com from SendMyFile.com. It's under: MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE KARAOKE SONGS 2. And there are two songs. I do not have the money to afford a voice eliminator, so it would be great if you could send me back the two songs with the vocals either eliminated or close to it. Thank you for your time.

Scott