Isolating Vocals

[mutualism]

What's up guys, quick (maybe not-so-quick?) question:

How the **** do people get clean vocal samples?

Lately I've been wanting to work with clean/isolated vocal samples on my SP404, and it seems that the options have come down to this:

1) Isolate the vocals myself using a DAW or Audio tool to flip phases and a bunch of other tricks
2) Find acapellas

The problem with #1 is that it never seems to work, and the problem with #2 is that they seem impossible to find.

Any suggestions you guys might have? I've tried working with snippets of songs where the vocals are present by themselves, but I'm finding that really limits me.

Thanks!

[formal]

#2 for sure. Buy 12" vinyl singles. They usually have an acapella.

Also sometimes I don't really give a fuck about isolating a vocal sample. I will just put a little filter on it and call it good. Usually the rest of your beat will cover it up.

[LAZER BEAR]

Acapellas4u.co.uk

[spwarlock]

Best luck I have is youtube for vocal tracks and use a video to mp3 converter and bam.....

[1616]

Or directly to the SP with RCA.

[hseiken]

There's methods you can use to pull out vocals in some tracks. It takes a bit of work and the end result can end up sounding muddy and you'll end up, usually, with a mono track...so if you were trying to sample some rnb chick with her back up singers all panned out nicely, you'd end up with flat mono mix at the end of the day.

Here's some shit on lifting vocals out of a track...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p5QC-4jGWA


...don't ask me for further help as I've never done it, but I do know that each song you're trying to pull vocals from must be tweaked to the song itself, there's not a 'GET VOX' shortcut.

Unless you go to an acapella site.

[spwarlock]

acapellas.Uk is an alright site but for me Im too impatient to wait a couple of minutes for the dl link to appear every time I want a track.....youtube has a larger selections of acapella tracks so you can either use an mp3 converter for that or use a smartphone,Ipad,etc. and sample direct into the SP...but for me I tend to use youtube the most.

[mutualism]

You know I had some feeling in the back of my head that there was no magic trick. If only the 404 came with "GET VOX" effect on the front instead of isolator!

thanks for the great advice anyways fellas