What's the best way (ie. "perfect magic solution") to remove acoustic guitar bleed from a vocal track. I'd like to apply some effects to the vocals and the guitar on the track is really muddying things up. I'm working with the eq, and that helps a little, but I'm hoping there's a better way.
 
Thanks!
 
Cindy

Hi, you can try that:
Copy the guitar track and shift the phase of the signal by 180 degrees. Than mix that signal to the vocal track. Be careful to find the right volume of the shifted signal. Start from -inf and increase the volume. if the distance of the mics were nearly the same, you will get a "noise cancelation" effect. the volume of the guitar bleed should decrease...
 
The idea behind it: the shifted signal sums up with the bleeded guitar like 2bleed - 2shift = 0

This sounds really interesting! The guitar mic track is pretty clean and was only about 18" from the vocal mic. How would I go about shifting the phase? (Please forgive my newbieness.)
 
Cindy

Track View with the Track Inspector open:
 

Awesome! Thank you so much!! Can't wait to try it.

I get this a lot but in my case its just bleed between the phrases.
if this is more of an issue then while vox is in signal.
hand limit between the phrases with automation.
I do this for every single vox track, including one I did today with 7 vocal tracks.
I would love to know an easier way.

I do that too, but this is a little different. This is a demo that I created for a singer/songwriter possibly to use as a scratch track. It came out a LOT better than expected (this singer is amazing) and if I can get the vocal track cleaned up, I think I can build something really cool with it. The singer won't be available again until August and I'd rather not wait. I really hope the phase trick will work.

All things being equal (no pun intended) it should work with the right "fiddling".

bapu
All things being equal (no pun intended) it should work with the right "fiddling".

Apparently not equal enough. It helped a little, but the guitar mic was enough closer to the guitar that the phase flip didn't do much. Useful technique though. I'm going to try that on another project that might be more conducive.
 
Thanks again for the suggestion!
 
Cindy

There's really no natural way to do it once its recorded.. without getting some wierdness.  Perhaps with some eqing the 2 tracks will work together.  Say - if a vocal has a certain frequncy range that the guitar sits in perhaps you can eliminate that from the guitar channel... say - if theres 400 to 800 hz spilling over ... perhaps pulling that are from the guitar channel?
 
In the future - you can use microphones that utilize a figure 8 pattern to really isolate very well in this scenario.  Pointing a figure 8 microphone towards the vocal with the guitar in the null underneath will really isolate very very well.