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Back when I was a teen, I used to strip out the vocal tracks on stereo music, by disconnecting the speaker ground wires from the back of the amplifier and conne
by derekp7 8y ago
Back when I was a teen, I used to strip out the vocal tracks on stereo music, by disconnecting the speaker ground wires from the back of the amplifier and connecting them to each other (so each speaker would ground against the other one). Since the vocal was "center", it had the same waveform on both speakers, so the speakers couldn't make a sound if they couldn't dump the ground to something. And the instrumentals weren't distorted too much. At least it worked good enough for a cheap Karaoke setup.
- robbrown451 8y agoI discovered this in the 80s when wires in to my car stereo speakers came loose and suddenly the vocal or lead instrument was missing from the music. Really puzzled me for a bit til I found the problem.
- redsky17 8y agoYou can generally do this pretty closely digitally by taking the left and right channels of a stereo track and inverting the phase on one of them. Since the vocals are usually panned center (as you said), the inverted phase ends up destructively cancelling them. Depending on how the instrumentation was mixed, usually the instruments are left pretty in-tact.
- codedokode 8y agoUsually the track sounds awful. For example, the bass can go away with the vocals, instruments' timbre change etc.
- vonseel 8y agoMakes sense since panning bass would be an odd thing to do.
- heywire 8y agoI discovered something similar by accident, only with the line audio cables between by tape/CD and the amplifier. I would pull the plugs out just enough so the tip made connection but not the ring. It would give the same effect.