Karaoke Forums

Well I have some technical questions regarding karaoke tracks/backing accompaniment tracks sold on internet.

1. Are they actually arranged by musicians?
2. Processed by sound engineers by doing vocal cut?
3. Original artist save a separate recording of his/her project for selling as karaoke tracks?

Any idea whatsoever?

OOh let's see who answers this first (bunch of us know this stuff here)

We'll start from 3 and work backwards... Makes a little more sense.

3. They could (and do in Japan, most Japanese artists release a karaoke version on the B side so to speak) but elsewhere karaoke still suffers a bit of a stigma. Not only that, but in karaoke every musician playing that original track has "claim" on the license in the US and elsewhere. Licensing original studio tracks (minus vocals) from anyone but Asian artists can be a nightmare for karaoke producers.

2. Never. There is no 100% way to cut vocals once it's mixed down to 2 tracks. Now, reading above, you understand why they don't want to license them in the first place.

1. Karaoke producers get the rights to the sheet music basically. Often times they don't even get that, so producing a karaoke track basically amounts to a few studio guys getting together, and reverse engineering said track.

The musicians working for the karaoke studio are on a "for hire" basis, so they're not entitled to the same royaltees as the original musician that made the music (and their contracts forbid them from making a claim)

The only, and the ONLY reason there is so much stickyness with the licensing is because lyric sweep based karaoke, by definition of the law is a "Visual work", like a movie.

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Living my life as Robert Cortese, 162 E. Jackson St, San Jose CA.

It's like the difference between high and low budget toilet paper, it really doesn't matter in the end. -exweedfarmer

Which is smarter? Just sticking to making/selling karaoke, while people all over the world create software FOR FREE that helps you sell it, or trying to compete with them and keeping it a closed loop while you blow your money into an industry (software) that you(the karaoke manu) knows nothing about?
-me

3. That's one way of doing it. There's very few artists in the US that are actually doing it this way, Taylor Swift is probably the most well known of the ones who are. She does her own karaoke discs so she gets to keep the whole income stream. (She's a smart l'il cookie, killer songwriter, and cute too!)

1&2. The best quality tracks are soundalikes recorded in a studio just like the tracks they're mimicing were. It's pretty much impossible to completely remove the vocal from a final mix using processing tricks. What's left usually sounds like a pile of poo.

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Dave's not here.