How to Remove Music from Vocals in Audacity?

You can remove music from audio recording using Audacity’s ‘Vocal Reduction and Isolation’ tool. It’s a very capable effect that will remove most of the music from the recording. You might have some music artifacts left, which you can then later further remove with a noise reduction tool if required.

Here’s how to remove music from audio recording with Audacity’s Vocal Reduction and Isolation tool:

Select the part of audio from which you want music to be removed
Go to Effect -> Vocal Reduction and Isolation
Set Action to Isolate Vocals
Set Low Cut for Vocals at 120Hz and High Cut for Vocals at 10000Hz.
Click ok
Go to Effect -> Normalize
Normalize peak amplitude to -1dB

^{Removing music and isolating vocals with Vocal Reduction and Isolation effect in Audacity.}

^{Raising the volume up with Normalize effect.}

Applying the Isolation effect will maintain Vocal frequencies at the range of 120Hz to 10,000Hz and remove most of the music. Your recording will become very quiet, therefore, we’re using Normalize effect to bring the volume back up. You can try raising the Low Cut for Vocals and lowering High Cut for Vocals to remove even more music but that will come at the cost of removing more vocals, so use it sparingly.

Alone this tool is not sufficient to completely remove the music but if you played it at lower volumes the music shouldn’t be heard.

After applying the isolation effect you can select the parts where previously only the music was played and use the Noise reduction (Effect->Noise reduction) tool to get Noise Profile and then select the whole recording, go to Effect->Noise Reduction again and apply it to further remove the music from the whole audio recording. Doing this will give better isolation but that comes at the cost of lower audio quality.

Audio before removing music in Audacity:

Audio after removing music in Audacity:

Audio after removing music in Audacity with both Isolation and Noise reduction tools:

You can read about removing vocals from music here.

To do a Stitch voice impression you’ll have to constrict your larynx, use a higher-pitched voice, speak more from the throat, raise the tongue, add some Hawaiian accent and watch lots of clips where Stitch is speaking. If you can record yourself while doing the impression it’ll make it even easier to spot where you need to improve and track your progression.

Constrict larynx

First of all, try to constrict your larynx, it should feel as if your throat is compressed in a tighter, smaller area. Stitch is speaking in a consistent voice, the amplitude of his pitch doesn’t change that much unless he’s exhibiting strong emotions, in that case, it becomes significantly higher in pitch, especially when laughing. Overall, try to maintain this constriction in your throat throughout the whole impression.

Higher pitch

Stitch’s voice is slightly higher than average, although it has some warmth to it. So, try to raise the pitch a bit when doing his voice impression but keep it minimal, you don’t need to go very high, just a tad bit.

When he’s speaking it seems like there’s this sheen added to his voice using an equalizer in post processing. If you’re recording the voice impression, you can boost 8kHz and above frequencies by a couple of dB to simulate the same effect.

Raise to the tongue

Stitch’s voice has a lot to do with the tongue placement. Try to rest the tongue against the roof of your mouth. It’ll give that warmth of his voice and help with constricting the resonance in the throat area. You should achieve a quite consistent voice.

You can place the tongue against the inside of the upper molars in your mouth and the root of your tongue should be raised a bit towards the roof of the mouth.

Listen to him speaking

As with any impression, listen to Stitch speaking a lot. This clip has plenty of those moments. Constantly listening to Stitch’s voice and manner of speech will help to learn the impression faster and more accurately.

Repeat the same phrases

Find some phrases that Stich is saying and try to repeat them in his voice, it’ll be easier than instantly speaking in random sentences. Once you master it then you can try to speak in Stich’s voice using any random sentence of yours.

Add some Hawaiian accent

Stitch is speaking in a Hawaiian accent. You can search for some Hawaiian people speaking in the accent on Youtube to help yourself get familiar with it and it’ll help to do Stitch’s voice impression.

As I listen to the Hawaiian accent they seem to overextend ‘O’ letter a lot and make their voices somewhat rounded up and softer compared to American English.

Manner of speech

Stitch speaks in abrupt, pointy sentences. He likes to have quick gaps between each word as if he’s struggling with human language and thinks about every word he’s saying in his head before articulating it. He’s not a fast talker and often speaks at a calm slow tempo.

When listening to Stitch try to catch the tempo and pauses in his sentences to figure out the manner in which he speaks, it’ll help to do a good voice impression.

Record yourself

Finally, record yourself to help spot flaws in your Stitch voice impression. Also, it’ll help to hear the improvement of your voice over time which could give more motivation and will be something funny to listen to later on.

You can learn more about voice impressions in this article and if you’re interested into recording gear then here’s a complete guide to it.