Have you ever wondered how to isolate a vocal from a song in order to sample it in a new track or use it for a remix? Lucky for you, isolating a vocal has never been easier than with Music Rebalance in RX. Music Rebalance is a revolutionary source separation tool that allows you to shift and isolate mix elements like vocals, bass, and percussion—all from a single mono or stereo file. For example, now you can isolate a vocal from a pop song and then reintroduce that vocal into a whole new environment for a remix.

In this article, I’ll show you how you can use Music Rebalance to isolate a vocal and separate it from the rest of the mix. Music Rebalance is one of the many audio restoration and editing plugins that come with RX. 

How to isolate a vocal

To get started isolating a vocal, open RX. Then, drag and drop the track you want to isolate the vocal from into the RX audio editor window in order to open it. On the right hand side of the audio editor window, click on Music Rebalance.

Once you’ve opened Music Rebalance, turn down the Other, Percussion, and Bass sliders all the way, leaving the Vocal slider at its default value of 0 dB. Alternatively, you can also click the solo button beneath the Vocal slider. Set the Quality to Best and leave the Separation slider at its default (38.0).

Note: if you don’t end up getting the results you’re looking for, you can come back to this step and play with different settings on the Separation slider to adjust the strength of the vocal isolation.

When you’re ready, press Render and Music Rebalance will isolate the vocal from the rest of the track automatically.

Alternatively, if you wanted to separate all the stems for use later in a remix, you could leave each of the stem sliders at their default value of 0 dB and click the Separate button instead—this will export each individual stem to its own separate track.

Once Music Rebalance finishes rendering, you’ll notice a change in the look of the waveform in the editor window. Your isolated vocal should now look something like this:

After Music Rebalance isolates your vocal, you can preview the result in the audio editor window or simply export the file by clicking File > Export and choosing your save preferences. Now, it’s ready to be dropped into a remix, or cut up and used for samples.

That’s it! Pretty simple, huh? With Music Rebalance in RX, isolating a vocal is a piece of cake.

Example of a vocal isolated with Music Rebalance

In order to show you just how powerful Music Rebalance is at isolating a vocal, I ran one of my own tracks through all of the steps above so that I could share the results. For this example, I chose to isolate vocals from my track “Wake Me Up” (I sang these vocals over an instrumental contributed by AWN). Here’s a quick preview of the track:

After I let Music Rebalance work its magic, I’ll have to say—I was quite impressed with the results! Check it out for yourself. Here’s what the isolated vocal sounds like for that same section of the song:

As you can hear, Music Rebalance does a tremendous job of removing all the other instruments in the mix, leaving only the isolated vocal for use elsewhere.

Note: I ended up choosing this particular track for my example because AWN and I released it independently under a Creative Commons license—meaning anyone can use this track however they see fit. Feel free to download the track here and try out Music Rebalance for yourself. And, if you do end up making a remix of it, definitely send it my way via my Instagram. I’d love to hear what you come up with. 

Isolate vocals with RX

Now, thanks to Music Rebalance in RX, you can quickly and easily isolate vocals to prepare them for a remix in an entirely new genre. If you don’t already have RX, you can demo it for free. 

The question is, now that you know how to isolate a vocal, what are you going to do with it?