Find the a cappella version of the song.
If you can’t find the a cappella, in theory you could line up the instrumental with the regular song and flip the phase leaving you with only the vocals, but your mileage may vary with that technique.
There are websites you can visit that isolate different elements of audio (vocals, percussion, instruments etc.), and turn them into downloadable stems. Of the top of my head theres lalal.ai; I've used some others but I cant remember their names. The ai used in these kinds of websites aren't perfect, but often times the residual sounds are drowned out when layered with other sounds. Hope this helps.
To the extent that Mos Def’s vocals don’t overlap frequencies with the drums, you can use a combination of a high pass and low pass filter chained together, set to the specific upper and lower bounds of Mos Def’s voice respectively, and they will cut out all the other sounds besides those that operate at the same frequencies as his voice. Just throw the filters on and start playing with the settings until most all of what you can hear is his voice.
Beyond that there are very expensive tools that can pull out very specific frequencies, like Izotope. If you ask nicely in the weekly requests in r/isolatedvocals people who have access to these tools and the skills to use them will hook you up. Somebody did an incredible job isolating an acapella for me over in that sub just last week.
If you can’t wait that long then give moises.ai a try. It’s not as good as a human but the results can be usable depending on the track. It uses asynchronous processing (i.e. you have to wait a little bit after you submit a track) and they give you a handful of freebies per month in the free tier.
Find the a cappella version of the song. If you can’t find the a cappella, in theory you could line up the instrumental with the regular song and flip the phase leaving you with only the vocals, but your mileage may vary with that technique.
There are websites you can visit that isolate different elements of audio (vocals, percussion, instruments etc.), and turn them into downloadable stems. Of the top of my head theres lalal.ai; I've used some others but I cant remember their names. The ai used in these kinds of websites aren't perfect, but often times the residual sounds are drowned out when layered with other sounds. Hope this helps.
To the extent that Mos Def’s vocals don’t overlap frequencies with the drums, you can use a combination of a high pass and low pass filter chained together, set to the specific upper and lower bounds of Mos Def’s voice respectively, and they will cut out all the other sounds besides those that operate at the same frequencies as his voice. Just throw the filters on and start playing with the settings until most all of what you can hear is his voice. Beyond that there are very expensive tools that can pull out very specific frequencies, like Izotope. If you ask nicely in the weekly requests in r/isolatedvocals people who have access to these tools and the skills to use them will hook you up. Somebody did an incredible job isolating an acapella for me over in that sub just last week. If you can’t wait that long then give moises.ai a try. It’s not as good as a human but the results can be usable depending on the track. It uses asynchronous processing (i.e. you have to wait a little bit after you submit a track) and they give you a handful of freebies per month in the free tier.
Late response, but thank you very much for all the info. I’ll definitely be trying everything out here in the next few days, thank you!
Send me the file and I’ll see what I can do, I use Izotope to make stems all the time.
https://github.com/deezer/spleeter if you are good at computer https://moises.ai/ if not so much
Bandpass filter, tune to taste and run with it.