What's the best method to isolate isolate vocals from a track?

Question

For example, say I bring a finished song from a professional musician in to Logic. The song has drums, guitars, pianos, bass, etc. But it also has vocals. How can I eliminate the singer or rapper so that only the instruments are left? Or vice versa, how can I eliminate the instruments, so only the vocals are left? In other words, if I sample Kanye West's "Heartless", how can I take out Kanye's voice? What filters are best? --No Kanye jokes please.

Answer 1

christianobermaier wrote:
Why is everyone so keen to isolate vocals ? And not the Saxophone ? Or the Accordeon ? Or the Tibetan Noseflute ? This question comes up once a day or so.
To get rid of everything in the center, including vocals, flip the polarity on one side and fold to mono.
Do it only for a specific frequency range if you want to at least try to preserve kick drum and bass, which are usually also centered.
For something like Kanye, it might be more effective/simpler to either just chop it apart and duplicate the parts where there are no vocals (thus vastly improving the song) or just rebuilding it entirely yourself.