[djfierce]

Originally Posted by Son Of Meat Loaf

He was able to do it because he had multi-track master tapes and a studio mixer at hand. During the recording process, each instrument, or 'group' of instruments, are recorded on a separate track. When the album is mastered, it is condensed down to just two tracks (left and right). Unless you have the multi-track masters, you will not be able to effectively remove any of the individual instruments or voices. There are PC programs available which claim to remove lead vocals, but they're not much cop. They just remove anything that is panned to the centre of the stereo spectrum (ie equal left and right) and remove that. This works for vocals most of the time, because they are (usually) in mono, and usually panned dead centre, however this is not always the case, and any instruments that are panned centre will be diminished as well. Also, vocals tend to have additional effects added, for instance echo and/or reverbs. Now, these tend to be in stereo, which means that they can often have different characteristics from either left or right speaker, hence the PC program will not eliminate them . What you have then is the 'ghost' of the vocal left over, which is not sonically pleasant!

Sorry for the long-winded response, but you did ask.

wow i thought i knew a thing or two but you taught me a couple of new things there
And people call me a smart arse