MikeyNL1038's Discovery and Tutorial

MikeNL1038 posted two videos this week, the latest, just a couple hours ago.

The latest one is called paul is dead - nothing is real 272 and features an EXCITING discovery. If you go to the new Official Fireman Web Site and you make the window smaller so that you can slide it, guess what you find! That's right -- A mirror image.

You can't go wrong with mirrors. From the Sgt. Pepper drum that becomes 1 ONE 1 X HE | DIE, to the the Walrus that emerges when you put a flat mirror on Diana Dors' elbow on the cover of Sgt. Pepper (as the Beatles did when they changed the ending of the promotional film of "A Day In The Life" for the Anthology), to what you find when you LOOK at Magical Mystery Tour for the word lOOK, to the word LOVE that becomes the word CODE, mirrors are everywhere in the Beatles mystery. It is Alice Through the Looking Glass. And somebody keeps writing to this blog saying, "Read the Record Mirror," which is a phrase uttered by Paul just one time in an unreleased outtake of the song "Let It Be." So, now we have the Official Paul McCartney Fireman web site playing with mirrors. It ain't the publius enigma moment and it ain't the smoking gun, but it is smoke and mirrors.

MikeyNL1038's other video was paul is dead - nothing is real 262

I honestly could not hear the word "dead" as Mike suggested in the video, but I did hear excellent sound and was extremely impressed by how he isolated the vocals.

I asked Mike if he would be willing to share what studio wizardry he employed to pull off the video soundtrack since we have several musicians and video makers who frequent this blog. Mike went above and beyond by writing a tutorial and sending it to me the very same day. So, let's give a big tip of the hat to Mike. He deserves a big thank you from all of us.

Mike's Audio/Visual Tutorial

How to extract vocals from 5.1 DVD's by MikeNL

Tafultong has asked me how I did the vocal isolation on my latest video. The video, paul is dead - nothing is real 262 contains the DVD version of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise)/The End. I wanted to make it extra clear on what Paul said in the (love you, love you, love you) part so I took The McCartney Years DVD set and a copy of DVD Audio Extractor. The program costs $29.

I ran the DVD folder through DVD Audio extractor and got 6 different tracks. The first 2 tracks are mostly the instrumental, track 3 is the center channel, which contains the isolated vocals (most of the time, heh). Track 4 and 5 are the rear-speaker channels which in this case, being a live concert and all, contains the audience sounds and a lowered instrumental. Track 6 is the subwoofer channel and has all the bass-frequencies in it.

Then I converted the video from Sgt. Pepper/The End to MPEG1 with VLC Media Player with the build in convert wizard. Then I imported all the files into Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 to make the video! (Click image below for full size)



There are also ways to convert a stereo recording to an (almost) completely vocal-less karaoke version. If Tafultong likes this idea I will post an tutorial on that too later this week.

Sure Mike! If anyone else has any tips and tricks that you think would interest others who read this blog, drop me a line (just put my name at Yahoo.com).

Thanks again, Mike.