Call me maybe - parody video help

[i-sidd]

Hi,

I am new to this so trying to do some research and find out what tools I would need.

I have a macbook air, and ipad if that matters.


I was wondering how to get just the music of call me maybe without the vocal and then add voice into it with different lyrics.

What would you recommend and how easy or difficult is this project

 

[floh]

You might be better off asking this question in the sound department. There is nothing about video in there yet, just about the karaoke soundtrack...

Doing this manually and have it sound good I would call "pretty hard" to do. If you want to spare yourself lots of work and frustration, I would go ahead and search for "Call me maybe karaoke" and buy whatever you find. It will cost you a few bucks at most, and save you lots of pain.

If you still want to do it and you are just starting out and are not sure you want to do this kind of thing very regularly, you should be fine with GarageBand and/or the free Audacity for the sound part.

The basic idea is that on most professional recordings, the instruments are distributed in the stereo room (e.g. the guitar is a little to the left, the drumset is to the far right, ...), but the lead singer is exactly in the center of the mix. You can now "get rid" of that lead singer if you "phase invert" one of the channels and add them to each other. Then everything that had an exactly equal signal on both sides will be cancelled out (the voice), but the rest will still roughly sound the same. Since the bass is often mixed in the center, too, you might need another go where you filter out all high frequencies, just leave the bass and add this to your mixdown.

If you use Audacity, there is a plugin that does exactly this process for you. So you can just download the software and throw the plugin at the song. Just mark everything (Cmd+A) and go to "Effect"->"Vocal Removal (for center-panned vocals)". You won't have as much manual control, but if you never did this before, that might be a good thing. You will notice that it probably sounds rather crappy... The room reverb of the voice is not centered and will still be audible, and you are probably also messing with the other instruments. But that is as far as you can take it without spending money on a karaoke version.

Hope that helps. If you have questions on the video shooting part, you might get more answers in this particular forum. One thing up front though: Before you export your recorded audio file to make the video to, be sure to add a few click or beep sounds in the beginning. That will make it much easier to line up the video and audio in post production.

 

[i-sidd]

You might be better off asking this question in the sound department. There is nothing about video in there yet, just about the karaoke soundtrack...

Doing this manually and have it sound good I would call "pretty hard" to do. If you want to spare yourself lots of work and frustration, I would go ahead and search for "Call me maybe karaoke" and buy whatever you find. It will cost you a few bucks at most, and save you lots of pain.

If you still want to do it and you are just starting out and are not sure you want to do this kind of thing very regularly, you should be fine with GarageBand and/or the free Audacity for the sound part.

The basic idea is that on most professional recordings, the instruments are distributed in the stereo room (e.g. the guitar is a little to the left, the drumset is to the far right, ...), but the lead singer is exactly in the center of the mix. You can now "get rid" of that lead singer if you "phase invert" one of the channels and add them to each other. Then everything that had an exactly equal signal on both sides will be cancelled out (the voice), but the rest will still roughly sound the same. Since the bass is often mixed in the center, too, you might need another go where you filter out all high frequencies, just leave the bass and add this to your mixdown.

If you use Audacity, there is a plugin that does exactly this process for you. So you can just download the software and throw the plugin at the song. Just mark everything (Cmd+A) and go to "Effect"->"Vocal Removal (for center-panned vocals)". You won't have as much manual control, but if you never did this before, that might be a good thing. You will notice that it probably sounds rather crappy... The room reverb of the voice is not centered and will still be audible, and you are probably also messing with the other instruments. But that is as far as you can take it without spending money on a karaoke version.

Hope that helps. If you have questions on the video shooting part, you might get more answers in this particular forum. One thing up front though: Before you export your recorded audio file to make the video to, be sure to add a few click or beep sounds in the beginning. That will make it much easier to line up the video and audio in post production.

Thanks for the detailed response,

I think I will try buying the karioke version and see how it goes.

 

[floh]

I think I will try buying the karioke version and see how it goes.

A very wise choice. I just tried the Audacity filter on the song, for fun, and while the verses are cancelled pretty efficiently, the voice in the chorus is still almost fully audible. Sounds like they had her record it three times and put one on the left channel, one on the right and one in the middle to achieve a wider sound.

Be aware that when buying the karaoke version (just like if you had cancelled the voice from the original), you did not purchase the right to publish it in any way. This means that worst case scenario, your video will be blocked on youtube, best case scenario they will just imprint lower third advertisement and the original artist gets the money. Just so you know.

You might even upload the karaoke song (without lyrics) first with a still image or something and see what happens to it on youtube. I don't want you to do all the work for nothing. But as many covers and parodies as there are of "call me maybe", I don't think the artist has marked it as "block".

 

[i-sidd]

Thanks for the copyright information.

With what you said, I think I may be getting in an issue here. I was planning to use this project for my work (company). My plan was to change the lyrics to suit our needs and ask some of our emplyees to sing while the music is played in the background.

I think will have to research more about this.