DESCRIPTION:
One of the best songs ever written, sung by a man with the voice of an angel.

While I love the quantity of multitracks that have rippled through the interwebs, not every song that I like is in Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

For songs recorded in the early 60s, you would be lucky to get a master tape with three or four individual tracks, and within that, you are highly unlikely to get a very clean acapella track. Also, there's the small issue that us "mere mortals" don't have access to the tape vault that holds said masters. :)

For over a year, I have tried every engineering trick I know to try and extract a clean, usable acapella from "A Change Is Gonna Come". I could get close, but not quite there.

About two months ago, I was turned on to RX8 Advanced by Izotope. I had RX4, but was not aware of the new "Music Rebalance" plugin in RX8. Essentially, complicated algorithms pull a vocal track, a guitar track, a drum track, and an "other instruments" track from any recording, even a mono recording! After finding some examples online, I quickly upgraded by RX4 to RX8.

The results are hit or miss, and often the resulting files suffer from that "ringing noise" (think of a really bad mp3, some satellite radio channels, or a bad Zoom meeting...that "underwater" sound). For this song, I was able to get a good enough result to have some fun.

I'm so happy to hear a shockingly clean acapella of this song. Finally!

Using some careful editing, echo, reverb and reverse reverb to create a more ethereal feel, enjoy this deconstruction.

#BLM

File uploaded: November 23rd, 2020