Behind The Mixer

Learn Church Audio Artistry | Church Sound

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The choir director drops a couple CD's and a track listing in your lap and says, "We’re using these split tracks for the Christmas service."  Personally, I don't like skipping around from song to song on a CD during a performance.  I also don't like using a split track for a big event.  Following the simple steps I use, you can simplify your audio work.

A split track is simply a stereo audio track in which the left or right channel has something the other does not.  Usually it's the vocals.  Singers love these because they can hear how the song should sound and then sing to just the instruments.

Using a stereo channel on your mixer, you can use the panning knob to pan out the channel with the vocals.  Or you can cut them out.

Here's how I do it using Audacity.

1. Burn the CD track to a stereo file in a lossless format.  

2. Open up the file and you’ll see two rows; one row for each channel.  If not, right-click over the channel and pick "split stereo track."

 

3. Mute the channel you think has the vocals.

4. Play the file and make sure you've muted the correct channel.  Retry with the other channel if necessary.

5. Delete the vocal channel.

6. Highlight the remaining channel (Edit-> Select-> All) and then pick "Duplicate."

7. On the new track, select the small down arrow and set the new track to the correct left/right channel.

8. Play the file again and make sure it sounds clear and correct out of both speakers/headphones.  

9. Export to lossless format under the File menu.  Different types are listed.

In the case of more advanced split track recordings, the songs can be split up into separate tracks.  In this case, I like to insert each track into audacity after the end of the previous file.  This way, I've converting six tracks into one.

I use this same process for each song.  Once I've got all my songs prepared, I can order them to match the order they will be played.

Once I've got the order set, I can burn them to CD or use a file instead (maybe you'd rather play it through the computer hooked into the sound system.)

Using this method, all my audio tracks are in order and I don't have to worry about remembering to pan out the vocals.  Another benefit to this method is that split tracks can have a lot of tracks per song.  For example, song #2 can list on the CD display at cut 19 and end at cut 29.  So if you lose your place, you're in trouble.

Remember, you should do everything possible to simplify your work during a performance.  Using this method, you can do just that.

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  2. I have a church DVD with split tracks on it. I can use VLC but have to pick track 2 to get rid of the voices. So then I can have the music with the words on the screen. The problem is that I cannot really run this off of the actual DVD as it buffers or reads sometimes. I think I need to burn the DVD (split track 2) to get rid of the voices but keep the music and words. Do you know how I would do that? Thanks.

    Reply

    • You should be able to play the DVD in a DVD player and via the mixer, pan left or right to remove the vocals. I’m surprised VLC would buffer. You could copy the DVD to a computer file and then you could play it without buffering, hopefully, but I’m not sure on the process for that.

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  3. I am brand new to Audacity. I have an accompaniment split track CD and each song has several tracks. How do I put those together to make the song play seamlessly? I am also removing the right channel as it has the vocals. I see how to mute and remove the right channel with the vocals but I can’t figure out how to put the individual tracks together so the whole song will play. I am doing this for our community choir that I sing in so we can just play a CD without having to pull the right RCA channel. I hope this enough explanation.

    Reply

    • Turn those stereo tracks into mono tracks using the dropdown menu on the far left side of the audacity track. Then take the whole file and save it as a wav or mp3 file to put them all together.

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  4. So funny, this just came up last night after services, a smaller church called in a panic, as their “split track” was not working, of course I was volunteered to correct it…. funny the timing your articles always seem to be !

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  5. I’ve had to re-do things multiple times. Case in point, my mother has recently recorded some background harmonies on her soundtracks. When singing them live, we discovered that they were too loud. I had saved the Audacity project file, so I went back in and brought the vocals down. It sure saved time, compared to re-recording the harmony parts.

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