New Bon Jovi Fan... Needing a Bit Of Help!

Hey everyone! First let me describe how much I admire Bon Jovi (after all, isn't that what we're all here for?!)!

Firstly, I'm fairly young for a Bon Jovi fan! I was actually introduced to them from my Mum (and yeah I don't care!) a few months ago! But I absolutely love them, we now have every studio album from them except the original Bon Jovi (a gap I intend to fill soon!), also we've got Cross Road, the One Wild Night Live album and Jon's solo album Destination Anywhere. I'm now jealous of Mum for having seen them on the HAND tour (in Manchester I think), I just missed it and I can't wait to see them live, because I know the One Wild Night CD probably doesn't even come close to the experience, and I absolutely love that CD! In a day when everyone around me seems to like listening to so much 'negative' music as I can describe it, emo, mosher, you know what I mean, I find myself absolutely loving the whole positive attitude of Bon Jovi. Every member of the band is outstanding solo, so when they come together something truly amazing happens! Their anthemic choruses that anyone can sing along to, to their powerful and moving ballads, so much history and variety with so much to love about them! I just hope when I see them live I don't get a 'Hull!'

That was the main brunt of my message actually, my request seems a little tacked on Basically my school has a music competition every year and its become somewhat of a tradition that I 'wreck' a song every year on stage in front of everyone! Anyway even if I can't sing that well I love to entertain and maybe get a message across, and as this is my last year I want to go out with a bang! To that end, I have selected to perform 'It's My Life,' and I'm trying to find the best backing possible to it to sing to on stage. So that's my request, I was wondering if you guys knew of the best instrumental (with or without backing vocals) version of It's My Life out there. I don't mind paying for it if I must! Last year I performed HAND with a pretty bad MIDI backing with Richie's guitar solo pasted in the middle using Audacity so of course this year I'd like to find something a little better.

Thanks, and Happy New Year! Can't wait for 'Lost Highways!'

A lot of audio packages will allow you to run a filter on a song to remove the vocals, effectively giving you a karaoke style backing track. I'm not sure if Audacity would let you do this as I haven't used it, but there are lots of programs, probably free ones, so you could find one of them and make it yourself from the original song.

I know Adobe Audition does that - but it's not a free program.

Not sure about Audacity - I haven't used it too much.

Kathleen

I don't believe Audacity does. If you've got Nero though, I believe it will do it.

On the other hand, I've got a karaoke version of It's My Life somewhere or other, if you're interested, drop me a pm. I can't make any promises though.

Either way, good luck!!

I'm actually having a decent amount of luck with Audacity... cancelling centred vocals using the 'stereo invert' technique gets rid of the drums too, but that's easily synthed in. And of course there's "Better stand tall when..." which is panned so wouldn't cancel and I dealt with another way (Highlight > Delete!) I've done a rough prototype that actually sounds pretty good! And there's plenty of time to tweak it. But I think I'll drop Northern Cowboy a PM to see what that karaoke version is like, thanks everyone!

Oh and a tip for anyone ever wanting to cancel vocals, you only get decent results from uncompressed files (ie from your CDs!), cos when files are compressed bits that are equal in each channel uncompressed lose their symmetry and so don't cancel properly.

I'm not too up on audio software but I will say if you opt for a karaoke backing make sure you listen to it first if you have to buy because I haven't heard one yet that actually has the talk box in (I think it's rubbish without it, same story with the karaoke 'prayer).

I think I'm definitely going to make it myself, most of the karaoke tracks I've heard sound like they have mice singing the backing vocals (and these mice are so loud they drown everything else out!), plus there's the absence of the talk box as you said. My version so far is a lot more like the original sound.