Replacing words in the vocals of a recorded song

Question

I am a middle school teacher and we are trying to play the song Roar by Katy Perry at our pretest pep rally. I was wondering if there is any way I can edit the song lyrics to say lion instead of tiger, as the lion is our school's mascot, while still using Katy's voice in the song. I didn't know if there was a program like finale that could.

Answer 1

I'm afraid the short answer is no.

It may be possible if you could find an instrumental version

Load both the completed track and the instrumental into a DAW and make sure they line up (I.e. listen to them at the same time).

Then mute the instrumental until the point you wish to change, and at that point mute the original track. (I.E. switch to instrumental at that point)

Then record a similar voice with your modified word.

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This will not, however, sound how you want it to. It's very unlikely that the change would be unnoticable.

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One small thought, tho, why not simply ask the kids to sing/shout 'lion' at that point?

Answer 2

I think it's possible, but it might require a lot of effort.

You can 'cancel' existing vocals, to an extent, with some fairly oldskool techno. A lot of mixers (digital or analogue) have a "voice cancel" facility.

This relies on the vocals being in the "middle" of the mix - ie not panned to one or other side in the stereo mix, and not too many effects on the voice. It plays the song with one side of the stereo reversed for the frequencies where the Vocals live (midrange) which makes that part of the sound cancel itself out. On some songs it's surprisingly effective - on others it either doesn't work or just sounds really odd if it ends up cancelling some of the backing track as well (eg piano or guitar - both also in the midrange)

If you're going to add a vocal over it to "replae" it you might get away with just reducing the midrange on that part of the song while someone sings "Lion" over it.

I'm not sure how KP's vocals sit in that song (I guess they're quite prominent) but there might be a possibility for success.

So if you wanted to, it might work like this : * Find someone who can "Lion" in as similar a voice as possible to KP.

• Play the song through a device whichh has such a facility (more on this later)

• At the point where she sings "Tiger" click the voice cancel button and mix in in the "Lion" sound / recording instead.

To do this you're going to need the device with voice cancelling - I'd guess most posh DAW software can do this, or a lot of mixers as I mentioned have a button built-in. For budgetoptiosn, search google for 2Behringer voice cancellation"

Or you can download software for this : Voice Cancellation Software

As others suggested, it might be easier just to have the kids shout "Lion" in an obvious way over it (more fun maybe?).

Note that you're probably always going to hear a bit of "Tiger" as the reverberaton of the original vocal track will probably spill into each stereo channel, and won't be removed by the voice cancellation process.

Answer 3

Finale is a score publisher program with some playback facilities. You'd need to use an audio sequencer/editor, the sort of thing often called a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).

You could obtain a backing track of the song and re-record, either using a KP sound-alike or not. You could record a sound-alike to the backing track and splice in just that one note.

You might find the impact of changing just that one word is inversely proportional to how seamlessly it sounds like KP :-)

If this is just for in-school use, I don't suppose anyone will care much about copyright issues. But if it was played to a larger audience, e.g. before a sports event, you might hit trouble.

Does your school have a music-tech class? Why not give it to them as a project? The result will matter less than the learning process.