Ok, at the risk of sounding boastful, let me say that my singing is above average! At the very least, I like to hear myself sing! When my friend from engineering college, Vinay Mantha, told me about karaoke sites where you could download the music minus the lead vocal track so that you could sing along, I was really excited! I visited the site he recommended (Make My Karaoke) and bought a few songs.
There are basically two types of karaokes available - audio and video. Audio karaokes have the entire music minus the lead vocal track. Video karaokes have whatever the audio karaoke has plus on the screen they play the lyrics and shade the part that is to be currently sung! So, video karaokes are really great if you don't know the song too well. Audio karaokes need you to know the song completely.
I downloaded a few of both.
Recently, on my trip to the US, my friends and I had a karaoke night at Dinesh's house in Seattle. There I realized that You Tube had a large number of karaoke tracks available!
I downloaded a few of them and played them. I found one problem however. Some of them had a pitch higher than what I was comfortable with! I was wondering how I could fix this as using those karaoke tracks, I wasn't comfortable at all as my voice would really need to stretch for the high pitched parts.
Google, as they say, is your friend! I looked for solutions and found it. Here's what I did:
- Opened the downloaded mp4 file that had the video karaoke in QuickTime Pro
- Extracted the audio track out of it by clicking on File -> Export -> Choose 'Audio only' in the Format drop down in the resultant dialog
- Launch Garage Band, create a new project and add a basic track (Track -> New Basic Track). Follow these steps to change the pitch of the song (from Brian Tychinski's comment to this post):
-- Click your imported track to make it the active track.
-- Click the i in the circle on the right of the interface.
-- Click the EDIT tab. You’ll see Noise Gate, compressor, and 4 empty slots.
-- Click one of the empty slots & change it to AUPitch.
-- Click the orange and yellow picture next to AUPitch. This will bring up the AUPitch dialog box.
-- Make sure your effect blend, smoothness & tightness is at 100%
-- To change a key up a whole step add +200, down -200. Half step, 100.
- Once you're done, click on Share -> Export song to disk...
- Make sure Compress is checked and in the drop down choose AAC Encoder is chosen. Click on Export. Choose a name and location and save the file.
- Now open iMovie, create a new project.
- Import the original mp4 file by clicking on File -> Import -> Movies...
- Click on Clip -> Detach Audio. the audio clip is now shown as a separate track. Click on the track and hot the Delete key on the keyboard.
- Now from Finder, drag the new file you just saved in Garage Band and drop it right at the beginning of the clip.
- Click on Share -> Export Movie...
- Choose the size, name and location and you're done!!
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