Need suggestions on reducing piano in vocal track

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
April 30, 2021
1 reply
481 views

Hi,

I've been helping the local HS choir record some songs since they can't have their typical end of grade concert. Today I was recording 5 tracks, 3 booms on the choir, one for the piano and one for some other instruments. Typically the turn out pretty good but today they did a song with a solo part using one of the booms and the singer was basicly to close to the piano. So I've got way too much piano in the solo track. I attempted to invert a copy of the piano to try and cancel it out but it just didn't work, I think because of the difference in distance from the piano for the 2 mic's.

I played with a few other effects but never really go anywhere. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Kelvin

How to

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer SteveG_AudioMasters_

Not really, I'm afraid. If the piano and singer have ended up on the same track, and they are occupying the same frequency range, then there's no practical way to separate them that will sound okay. The cancellation trick only works with an exact copy - sample for sample. Your only real bet (if it's possible and desired) is to re-record it, I suspect.

SteveG_AudioMasters_

Correct answer

Community Expert

Not really, I'm afraid. If the piano and singer have ended up on the same track, and they are occupying the same frequency range, then there's no practical way to separate them that will sound okay. The cancellation trick only works with an exact copy - sample for sample. Your only real bet (if it's possible and desired) is to re-record it, I suspect.

K

Kelvin5FF3Author

Participant

Thanks Steve,
I suspected that was the case but willing to consider any clever ideas. I
don't have to completely eliminate the piano, just reduce it enough to get
it under the singer.

SteveG_AudioMasters_

Community Expert

When I said 'no practical way', perhaps I should explain what was in the back of my mind... in theory, Melodyne can separate out individual sung notes (although how well this would work in practice with an over-loud piano I'm not sure) and let you alter the amplitude of them. Trouble is, even if you could do this, you'd have to treat each note individually, and it's inevitable that the end result would sound weird, to say the very least, as it's inevitable that it would alter the piano harmonics to an extent as well. So it really wouldn't be worth the effort. And Melodyn isn't that cheap, either.

The only other possibility is a bit of software called Spleeter. It's open-source, and certainly far from perfect. And there's no simple interface either - you have to do quite a bit of work to run it, and presently it only runs from a command-line interface. But some of the results are quite interesting, despite the whole thing being a bit left-field at present*.

*Update on that - apparently iZotope's RX8 music rebalance uses the Spleeter algorithms. If you can post a sample, I can try that for you if you don't have RX8.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded