A New Backing Vocals Editing Trick

If you've been following this blog, you've probably noticed I've been singing the praises of the sound editing program Spleeter. To refresh your memory, it splits any song into five tracks: bass, drums, vocals, piano, and other. That has allowed me to edit songs in ways never before possible (unless one has the multi-track version, which almost never happens).

Anyway, the other day I was talking with my musical associate Mike Solof. He can't use Spleeter, because although it's free and easy to use, it only works for PC computer and he has a Mac. Instead, he found a similar program called X-Minus:

https://x-minus.pro/

It only splits a song into the vocals on one track and the instruments on another. But it does something else that Spleeter doesn't do, which is pretty remarkable, in my book: it can split the backing vocals from the lead vocals. I don't know how it does this - how can it tell which is which?! But I tried it out on one song, and it worked like a charm. So thanks for the tip, Mike!

The song I experimented on is "Mary Ann" by Bob Dylan, from the 1973 album "Dylan." I was considering including this song on my recent compilation album "A New Morning Portrait," but I didn't because I found the backing vocals too prominent and heavy-handed. So last night I tried to remove the backing vocals. Sure enough, they were all gone, even when they overlapped with Dylan's voice!

I have a zip file here with three versions of the song. One has the original version from the "Dylan" album, unchanged. Another has all the backing vocals removed, using X-Minus. The third is kind of a halfway point, where I used X-Minus to edit the backing vocals way down in the mix (and cutting out some backing vocal bits I didn't like altogether). I actually like that halfway version the best, and I'm adding it to the "A New Morning Portrait" album today.

Here's the zip so you can judge how the program works itself:

https://www115.zippyshare.com/v/CET6AAOH/file.html

Anyway, the rest I'm explaining all this is to let you know of this promising new editing possibility. If you know of any songs where it would sound better with the backing vocals removed, or the main vocals removed but the backing vocals remain, etc... these are now things that may work. I'm not sure just how effective this program is, since I've only used it with one song, but I'm so impressed with what it did to that one song that I thought I'd share this news.

And on a somewhat related note, in putting together the CSNY 1969 live compilation I posted yesterday, I discovered another neat editing trick using Spleeter. Getting rid of hiss is a common problem with bootlegs. One can apply noise reduction to that, but it's a crude tool that effects everything, and usually degrades the sound of the music. That's still a problem with songs. But if there's a track that's just talking, I've discovered that if I run that through Spleeter, it usually puts all the talking on one channel and all the hiss on a different channel. So it's a cleaner and more effective way to get rid of hiss. (The reason it only works for talking tracks is because if it's a song, some of the music ends up on the same channel as the hiss.)

So if you know of a concert bootleg with lots of hiss through the talking, this could do wonders. If you know of any such recordings, let me know. Or you or other people could make these fixes yourselves, since these are easy programs to use. If you do improve some recordings, please let me know that too, and maybe I can share them through this blog.