Some tracks light a fire inside us that explodes a wild flame of inspiration. Our minds race to remix the track, but the stems aren’t always readily available.

Sometimes, though, we can work around this minor setback and isolate the songs’ vocals from the rest of the music. But it’s one thing talking about isolating vocals and another doing so.

Thankfully, there are ways to isolate vocals that aren’t overly complicated. Knowing how to isolate vocals in a song will give you unlimited access to every studio accapella ever sung. This means you can remix any song you so desire. For Ableton users, Sam Smyers has created an easy-to-follow YouTube tutorial on three methods of isolating vocals in Ableton.

How to Isolate Vocals in Ableton

Invert the Phase of the Instrumental

Sam Smyers’s first method of isolating vocals in Ableton is phase inversion. Unfortunately, this trick only really works if you have access to the instrumental of the song as well as the full studio version. Scour the internet for the instrumental of the track you want to remix. A great place to look is Reddit!

When you have both the instrumental and full studio version of the track, insert them both into Ableton’s arrange page and make sure that the tracks line up perfectly in time.

Before we go on, let’s talk about noise-canceling headphones. Noise-canceling headphones are able to cancel noise the way they do because they blend the original signal with a duplicated signal with its phase inverted. This method cancels out the noise! We’re using the same technique here to isolate the vocals and cancel out the instrumental of the track.

Insert Ableton’s Utility plugin onto the instrumental’s channel. In the Utility plugin, you can invert the phase of both the left and right channels individually. If you now play the two tracks together (the instrumental and full studio track), the instrumental of the track should be pretty well canceled out and your vocals should be mostly isolated.

This trick works better on some tracks more so than others. You may notice that reverb and delay tails are still noticeable behind the vocals, and possibly some drum transients.

Before you go any further, bounce the isolated vocal down into an audio file by playing both the instrumental with its phase inverted and the original track.

When you have the somewhat isolated vocals bounced to an audio file, you can experiment with some gentle EQ’ing to remove those pesky tails and transients. You could also experiment with a noise gate. Read your dBFS meter and see what threshold would suit your noise gate for this job and see how much of the background noise is attenuated to silence.

You’ll find a variety of vocal loops and one-shots em masse in the Mixxed sample library. They’re DAW ready, so you won’t need to work extract them or tire yourself before you even work with them in your track!

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