This is a little haphazard thing I thought I'd share. It's a method of *kind of* (and I mean this very, very roughly) making an acapella version of a song by combining it with its instrumental then removing the similarities, leaving only what isn't common between both tracks.
It's interesting and nice to hear the vocals a bit clearer on some songs where we have yet to see any multitracks, but do have the instrumentals from The eYe or a karaoke release. Like I said the results are nowhere near a true acapella, but it's still nice to separate things a bit.
It can't just be applied to the whole song at once as eventually the waveforms will fall ever so slightly out of sync (and they have to be utterly perfect to get good results), so you can only really do it bit by bit separately, so you'll hear the instruments fading in and out. I thought a good example to try would be the final chorus of Breakthru, and I love the higher pitch "If I can make you smile", so I thought I'd time it so the instruments end up being at their quietest there.
Very rudimentary but I hope others at least find it a bit interesting.
Yeah, I know what you say, trying to do this kind of things is hard and take a very long time. I've done a few, but never found the time to finish them. Of course, these are not like a true isolated vocal, but it's something. The main difficult with "Breakthru" is the unstoppable tempo variations during the tracks. I think it's because of being analogic.
Anyway, it's a pleasure to hear Freddie singing more clearly.
Here you have some of them!
.
And here's The isolated right channel from "Who Needs You", having deleted some other details to isolate more the vocals. It's a really funny thing to hear! Freddie fools around with the mic, you hear him sorrowing and the "Ohh muchacho, muchacho..." and "I like it, I like it!".
.
Nice, thanks for those links! You clearly have more of an ear for it than me lol.
I'm toying with Ride the Wild Wind right now but it seems the drums are too heavy for me to eliminate very well. Funny considering heavy drums should be easy to sync up due to the impact they have on a waveform making things clearer...
EDIT: Wow, it really worked well in Gimme The Prize, didn't it? In those clips it almost sounds entirely acapella. Instruments are very quiet.
Days of Our Lives is beautiful too.
Thank you! It's more a thing of patience than ear really lol, if you are precise enough you can achieve great results. With "Ride the Wild Wind" I don't think it'll work, because is an enterely new mix, very different from the original mix. This applies to:
"Ride the Wild Wind"
"Dragon Attack"
"Fight from the Inside"
"Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll"
"More of that Jazz"
"I Can't Live with You"
"You Take My Breath Away"
"Was It All Worth It"
"Don't Lose Your Head"
"Princes of the Universe"
"A Kind of Magic"
"Kashoggi's Ship"
...and I think "Party", "The Hitman" and "Headlong"
I'm not mentioning those songs like HtF or GDML, from which we already have the isolated tracks.
But the rest of the songs can be worked and get some cool results! Remember, it's all a matter of patience.