Create Your Own Karaoke Tracks
- Ken Buttle
- Oct 6, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 6
1. Check out the YouTube videos using Audacity in several ways to suppress the vocal components of a track, with varying degrees of success.
2. Using a laptop running Windows, MacOS, or Linux, download any free audio processing application, like Audacity, and edit tracks to remove the vocals.
3. The new audio track with the vocals removed can be added to a slideshow in PowerPoint or any other presentation application. Create slides with the lyrics and other catchy graphics on them, and time the slide transitions to the music.
After some fun and creative work, you have your own personalized karaoke presentation for your next backyard party!
An example of a home-cooked Karaoke track is included directly below this blog post. Vocals removal is a bit of a misnomer. It is successful in suppressing the vocals in some cases, but definitely not all. If the vocals are from multiple singers, or one singer multitracked, the process does not work well. For a single singer with a wide vocal range, the removal bandwidth removes much of the music content as well, and gives poor to middling results. In the case of the selected track, “Johnny Strikes Up The Band” by Warren Zevon, his singing has lots of character, but not a wide vocal range. The bandwidth for vocal removal leaves much of the music intact, though it does suppress some nice guitar runs. Vocal removal is turned off at the song lead-in and the guitar breaks in the middle and at the end of the track, which gives more of the full song flavor when the karaoke amateur singer(s) pause(s).
Remember that any songs plus lyrics that you choose to karaoke-fy are probably under copyright protection. Therefore, any use of the material, and any use of photographs on the accompanying video, must not be used for profit. For example, the included PowerPoint presentation is only offered as just that: an example of the karaoke creation process described in this blog.
The backyard DJ/Karaoke party with friends and neighbors is a harmless setting for showing off your homegrown editing skills!
Ken Buttle
P.S.: Download the .pptx file below and open it with Microsoft Office PowerPoint. Click on "Slide Show" at the top of the screen, and select "From Beginning" to run the show. The audio will start playing immediately, and the slide sequencing will execute automatically.
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