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How to Remove Singing From a Song for a Mac

If you want to create an instrumental or karaoke version of a song from your music collection, you need to remove the vocals. Unless the song is an original composition, for which you have the individual audio files, it’s not possible to remove the singing entirely. Instead you must filter out the frequencies upon which vocals lie. Macs are particularly useful for audio editing due to their intuitive interfaces and high processing speeds. Also, the GarageBand program, an entry-level digital audio workstation, typically comes free with a Mac, meaning your Mac already has the requisite tools to remove singing from a song.

Things You'll Need

  • Mac
  • Digital audio workstation
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Instructions

  1. Master Mixes

    • 1

      Click the icon in the “Applications” folder to launch your preferred digital audio workstation.

    • 2

      Import the relevant master max via the “File” menu. A master mix is any song file that doesn’t contain individual audio tracks, such as the songs in your iTunes library. Since the master mix is a single file, it’s more challenging to remove the vocals. It is a distillation process, rather than a simple removal of an individual element.

    • 3

      Open the equalization tool. The method for doing so varies depending on which digital audio workstation you use. For example, if using GarageBand, click “Track Info,” “Edit” and select “Visual EQ.” An eq lets you increase or decrease the prominence of various frequencies in an audio recording. By decreasing the frequencies that make up the vocal, you can decrease the prominence of the singing. Then by boosting the frequencies of the instrumentals, you can “hide” the singing behind the music.

    • 4

      Click on the equalizer curve. This curve is superimposed over a grid. The horizontal axis represents frequency, and the vertical axis represents amplitude. The high frequencies are located on the right, low ones on the left.

    • 5

      Move the curve up until the singing becomes prominent. This means you’ve isolated some of the frequencies in the vocal track. Drag the curve to zero to mute that frequency. Because vocals cover a range of frequencies, typically from around 8 Hz to 400 KHz, it’s necessary to repeat this process multiple times. Each time you reduce a frequency to zero, click the curve to set that frequency at that amplitude level.

    • 6

      Continue moving the curve, this time to increase the instrumental frequencies. These have a wider range of frequencies. Once you’ve boosted the instrumental sufficiently, the singing should be much less audible, to the point of being muted.

    Multitracks

    • 7

      Launch your preferred digital audio workstation.

    • 8

      Select the session containing the multitrack session you want to edit. Multitrack sessions are those not rendered as a master. For example, a work-in-progress containing individual instrument and vocal tracks.

    • 9

      Click the mute button on each vocal track. This completely removes all of the vocal from the song.

    • 10

      Save the session as "Song Title, no vocals" and quit the program.

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