I am interested in doing some more remixes. Previously i have done one from a ‘bootleg’ vocal stem and one from an official artist stem. The artist stem was Erasure and part of a ‘fan’ competition. I only found out about it through their ‘fan’ PR, not through a remixing route (if that makes sense).
Ideally, I would love to work with artist stems of course. However and therefore part of the question is 'how do you get into a position of being given artist stems to work with?
The second (and potentially most likely in the beginning to happen) part of the question is how to create your own vocal extractions or improve the bootleg versions you find on YouTube etc. I find acapela4U has a lot of older stuff, but not the more recent. Does anyone know of a better resource?
hey Elton, I’ve worked with acapellas for years, both clean and bootleg stems. waves has a plugin called X-Noise that is pretty amazing. IZotope’s noise plugin comes close but not quite the same. I’ve A/B’d X-Noise with 3 or 4 other plugins and it just does the trick where they lack. So I would just use it first in the chain to remove any noise mostly in the mid to mid-high range and it really cleans it up. For the type of music I make it’s mostly the mid range of the vocals I’m interested in using anyhow. A little Auto-tune, manual pitch adjustment, eq, and minimal compression (acapellas are usually compressed), and sometimes I’d use the waves CLA Vocal and then I’d mix around the acapella. You can do the same though with just any noise removal plugin and all the other components to prep the acapella. It is more difficult to find modern pellas. I’d make my own by singing then cutting up and heavily processing them and they worked fine some of the time. Also if you know of any local amateurs who can sing but maybe aren’t phenomenal (you’re going to make them sound great through processing) and you can trade some recording or mixdown work for vocals, that works. For bootlegs I would duplicate the track into three or four stems and then use very creative filtering to make separate layers to use in the mix. This can work great. Hope maybe some of this helps. I don’t produce alot under this alias much these days but here is a link to some stuff I’ve done with acapellas. https://soundcloud.com/dwnsampla
And it was on sale tonight, so there’s another one in the bag! Thanks @sight for that one. I will post the track I am working on once done and tag you if that’s OK. This is part time for me, so any help from those with more experience is very welcome. I am the original ‘life long learner’!
Beatport Play was doing a number of remixes but I’m not seeing the page anymore… If you wanted to do some bootlegs for practice you can download some beatport tunes in the stem format… There’s also a site called remix comps that has legitimate artist remixes as well… Often small artists but ocasionally links to bigger ones as well…
Stems are also a great source for AB-ing your tunes in groups. Super handy… Also Izotope RX does incredible things for removing noise. It’s a standard in film post production… Quite pricy, but worth looking into down the road, but they also have the RX plugin suite which goes on sale regularly for a very reasonable price.