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SO, YOU LIKE TO SING? |
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Note: This brief article was published, citation information below. |
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Ang, M. (2003).“So, You Like to Sing?” Jaring Internet Magazine. April 2003 issue. (ISSN No.:1511-2608) |
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The World Wide Web is a wonderful resource for those who like to sing. Whether you’re a nightclub singer or just a bathroom singer, there’s something on the Web for everyone :) Let’s start with the ever present problem faced by singers who are NOT musicians - where can we get accompaniment tracks? On the Web, you can locate and download hundreds of favourites, especially the older songs, but sometimes also the new. The most useful downloads are those in the MIDI format, because they can be easily customized to suit your vocal range (is the original too high for you? No problem, with MIDI you can always lower the key to one that is more singable for yourself) as well as tempo (fast songs can be slowed down, slow songs can be speeded up) besides allowing you to mute the melody line so you can sing along to the Minus One accompaniment. MP3 downloads are less useful - they usually have the original singer’s voice recorded together with the music, and of course you don’t want to compete with him or her - you just want the music accompaniment to go with your own voice! A frequently asked question is “can I blank out the singer’s voice so I can sing along with the music?” This is technically possible, but very difficult to do completely in a clean manner, unless the original recording has been produced specifically for karaoke. Also, you would need to buy specialist software (a very limited number of such software are available). In a karaoke recording, the vocal is recorded onto a unique track of its own (often using only simple left and right channels to separate music from voice), so it is a straightforward matter to mute or blank out the vocal line leaving a clean music track for you to sing with. In a regular recording, however, the music and voice are blended together to produce an integrated soundtrack, making it very difficult indeed to separate out the two once again. Software that claims to be able to do so mostly employs some sort of frequency filtering technology, which not only filters off the human voice but also any music at those identical frequencies. The resulting accompaniment track is thus not as complete or balanced as if you had the music track recorded minus the vocal track. Going back to what I was saying about MIDI - with this technology, you can create your own Minus One tracks that are potentially perfectly complete (without the distortions introduced by filtering MP3s) and also free of charge. All you need is to download one of the freeware or shareware MIDI editing software available on the Web (try the Shareware Music Machine at http://www.hitsquad.com/smm - you’ll find dozens of titles there). Open your MIDI file in the software - what you will see (the specific on-screen look may vary, but the components present are the same in all editors) is a row of tracks, one for each instrument sound you hear. In MIDI, you won’t hear any singer’s voice, but you may hear the song melody being played by an instrument. If so, all you have to do is to identify which track contains the melody (usually the top or first track), and simply mute that track - you will definitely find a command somewhere within the editing software to do this. Or you may be blessed enough to find a MIDI file without the melody (actually quite a lot of songs are available on the Web in this ready-to-playback and sing format). Also, in the editing software, there will definitely be a command somewhere labelled transpose - what this command does is allow you to change the key of the music - i.e. you can make it higher by adding a positive number (+1 makes it a tiny bit higher, +2 more so, +3 even more, and so on) or lower by adding a negative number (-1 a little lower, -2 more so, et cetera). What you need to do is to select all your tracks, but NOT the drum track, and then hit the transpose command. The reason you mustn’t select the drum track is because drums have no specific pitch or tune, so if you transpose a drum note, instead of sounding higher or lower, you may change a side drum into a cymbal or some other weird sound. So leave the drums alone and just change the pitch of those instruments that are tunable. Slowing down or speeding up the entire song can be easily done also - you need to look for a menu item labelled tempo and make adjustments. A higher number will mean a faster speed and a smaller number will mean a slower speed. Once you’ve finalised all your adjustments, make sure you save your file to keep them. Where can we find all these MIDI files then? Actually, in most cases, simply typing the song name and MIDI in the Google search box will find you the song you need. Make sure to download and listen to several different versions because not all MIDI files are necessarily well sequenced and you may find many different arrangements of the same song. Lyrics are easy to locate, too. Again a simple Google search will most often be able to locate for you what you are looking for. Lots of different MIDI sites do exist that you can search through also, such as MIDI Farm and others, but my favourite method to locate songs is just Google. ;-) Besides singing along to your computer, it is also possible to take your modified MIDI file and record the output to audio, to produce a music CD that you can playback on any CD player and sing along to. I’ll save that explanation for another time. In the meantime, enjoy yourself! |