I'm definitely into the idea of trading classic hip-hop acapellas. I have a small collection of rap 12"s with acapellas for cuts and samples. I snap em up whenever I find decent ones. Here's a one that I just ripped:
I'm also curious about your DIY acapella making technique. I've only ever tried this with mp3s, and ended up with pretty sloppy sounding results. How do you get it to approach studio quality? Do you need an uncompressed copy off a CD?
"I'm also curious about your DIY acapella making technique. I've only ever tried this with mp3s, and ended up with pretty sloppy sounding results. How do you get it to approach studio quality? Do you need an uncompressed copy off a CD?"
Well kind of, I actually seek out lossless rips first and then go from there if not available.
Really the biggest snag to making usable near studio acapellas from rips (vinyl or cd) is just the annoying wow and flutter problem. Almost everything in the pre-digital age was recorded on tape machines, and you're always going to have little pitch and speed fluctuations when the music gets pressed. In those cases it boils down to just tedious and time consuming chopping and pasting to line things up.
The rest is kind of my secret KFC recipe since I often use three pieces of software all at once to get the best results. I actually very rarely do straight phase inversion (vocal/instr) pellas anymore unless I have modern digital lossless rips.
My specialty is the golden era hip hop classics of the 80's and 90's and most of those rips have the problems I mentioned above. There's also cases where they added more bells and whistles to the vocal version and the instrumental is more basic (dry) Then you have to start playing with volumes and channels.
Frankly most of the diys I hear around to me are garbage. CPU pellas (frequency extraction) are almost always over-filtered and tinny sounding. It took a decade plus of trial and error and pulling my hair out to find that perfect sweet spot where you get the crisp loud vocals and very minimal background artifacts. I will always choose to have some slight background bleed which is easily covered up in the mix over tinny over-filtered mud. No diy is ever going to 100% perfect, then again I have studio pellas with such loud headphone monitor bleed that they sound like a diy lol
Actually in some cases my diys made from direct cd rips are better then the studio rips from vinyl. Vinyl is notorious for glitches (pops/clicks) and that same damn wow and flutter issue.
This is an ODB-Got your Mone diy pella I made from the clean studio version mixed with bits of the dirty diy I made years ago. A remixer friend has the studio multitracks to the explicit ODB-Got your money, but won't trade for anything but equal multi tracks, which I don't have a lot of. So if anyone out there has the full dirty version pella please let me know. Always down to trade.
Thanks for revealing a bit of the secrete process.
It took a decade plus of trial and error and pulling my hair out to find that perfect sweet spot where you get the crisp loud vocals and very minimal background artifacts.
I'm interested, what motivated you to spend so much time and effort on this? Are you really into remixing?
Just a little hobby on the side really, I wasn't able to get all those exclusive studio pellas with the connected dj/producer AIM crowd back in the day so I just started making my own from my cd single and vinyl collection. I originally just set out to replace all the awful over-filtered cpu hip hop pellas out there with ones that if mixed right could sound as professional as possible. I do like remixing, but diy acapella making is challenging and fun, not so much if it doesn't work though.
Here's a KRS One diy pella I just made, is there a studio version? Dunno but I think mine is pretty good.
Enjoy
KRS One-Hip Hop Lives diy acapella https://www.sendspace.com/file/iw84h3
Oh Shit, thanks so much for this! I was actually going to request it, so I'm really glad you hooked it up. Out of curiosity, is this on wax at all?
Now I just need to keep looking for Young Jeezy Soul Survivor (pretty sure you have to be a name mixtape DJ to nab that one, but oh well)
Nah the regulate pella was never on wax. The Jeezy is defenitely not out yet either.
NOW I HAVE A HUGE REQUEST. DOES ANYONE HAVE THE JODECI FT RAE AND GHOST - FREAKIN U REMIX ACAPELLA?[/b] IT'S ON A PROMO I THINK. I'VE BEEN AFTER THAT FOR YEARS.
djtopcat said: NOW I HAVE A HUGE REQUEST. DOES ANYONE HAVE THE JODECI FT RAE AND GHOST - FREAKIN U REMIX ACAPELLA?[/b] IT'S ON A PROMO I THINK. I'VE BEEN AFTER THAT FOR YEARS. THANKS.
I think I have a promo for that but my hip hop shelves are a mess. I'll try to take a look sometime soon...
djtopcat said: NOW I HAVE A HUGE REQUEST. DOES ANYONE HAVE THE JODECI FT RAE AND GHOST - FREAKIN U REMIX ACAPELLA?[/b] IT'S ON A PROMO I THINK. I'VE BEEN AFTER THAT FOR YEARS. THANKS.
I think I have a promo for that but my hip hop shelves are a mess. I'll try to take a look sometime soon...
Comments
Nas - One Love http://www3.zippyshare.com/v/pdC41CSF/file.html
I'm also curious about your DIY acapella making technique. I've only ever tried this with mp3s, and ended up with pretty sloppy sounding results. How do you get it to approach studio quality? Do you need an uncompressed copy off a CD?
Well kind of, I actually seek out lossless rips first and then go from there if not available.
Really the biggest snag to making usable near studio acapellas from rips (vinyl or cd) is just the annoying wow and flutter problem. Almost everything in the pre-digital age was recorded on tape machines, and you're always going to have little pitch and speed fluctuations when the music gets pressed. In those cases it boils down to just tedious and time consuming chopping and pasting to line things up.
The rest is kind of my secret KFC recipe since I often use three pieces of software all at once to get the best results. I actually very rarely do straight phase inversion (vocal/instr) pellas anymore unless I have modern digital lossless rips.
My specialty is the golden era hip hop classics of the 80's and 90's and most of those rips have the problems I mentioned above. There's also cases where they added more bells and whistles to the vocal version and the instrumental is more basic (dry) Then you have to start playing with volumes and channels.
Frankly most of the diys I hear around to me are garbage. CPU pellas (frequency extraction) are almost always over-filtered and tinny sounding. It took a decade plus of trial and error and pulling my hair out to find that perfect sweet spot where you get the crisp loud vocals and very minimal background artifacts. I will always choose to have some slight background bleed which is easily covered up in the mix over tinny over-filtered mud. No diy is ever going to 100% perfect, then again I have studio pellas with such loud headphone monitor bleed that they sound like a diy lol
Actually in some cases my diys made from direct cd rips are better then the studio rips from vinyl. Vinyl is notorious for glitches (pops/clicks) and that same damn wow and flutter issue.
This is an ODB-Got your Mone diy pella I made from the clean studio version mixed with bits of the dirty diy I made years ago. A remixer friend has the studio multitracks to the explicit ODB-Got your money, but won't trade for anything but equal multi tracks, which I don't have a lot of. So if anyone out there has the full dirty version pella please let me know. Always down to trade.
https://www.sendspace.com/file/sj5r9b
I'm interested, what motivated you to spend so much time and effort on this? Are you really into remixing?
Here's a KRS One diy pella I just made, is there a studio version? Dunno but I think mine is pretty good.
Enjoy
KRS One-Hip Hop Lives diy acapella
https://www.sendspace.com/file/iw84h3
it's the dalvin remixes 12"
http://www.discogs.com/Jodeci-Freek-N-You-Remixes/release/2491430