I’ve recently been experimenting with remixing pre-existing songs. I love a good a capella because it places creative constraints on what you’re working on. It also gives you the chance to work with a vocal, even if you don’t have a vocalist. And finally it puts your own tracks into context, it makes it intertextual, laying bare your influences and what you’re listening to, paying homage.
Recently, I’ve been making quite a lot of remixes with the A Capellas of Ariana Grande—there are simply a lot of them (the source of them is probably questionable, but hey). The stems of practically all of her albums are online, so I just picked out the a capellas and dropped them into a folder called “A Capella.” I can just drag and drop them from inside Logic Pro into the tracks area. And then I can get to work.
My plan is to amass a small library of A capellas—preferably legal and easily accessible. Where I draw a line is poor quality A capellas that someone extracted from the original using AI tools or phaseflipping and uploaded to YouTube. They simply don’t sound good. I also don’t want to pay a service like BeatStar or whatever these websites are called, since I don’t want to fork out 15 USD per month for these sites I don’t even enjoy browsing.
So I came up with a different solution, one that is perhaps a bit cumbersome, but has an element of sleuthing, which I enjoy.
One good trick to use is to keyword search “A Capella” or “A Cappella” (best use both spellings) in discogs.com — a database for recorded music, that has served me well in the past.
Using this method I found this A Capella release of Hannah Diamond’s Reflections—one I didn’t know existed before!
Discogs is great—think of it as an enormous digital record store that lists every record ever released. You can’t buy, only browse. But at least you get a sense of a record’s existence.
I’ve found two powerful ways of searching for A Capellas: by year and by artist. You need to use advanced search for this.
By year: When I searched “A Capella” under Track Title and “2002” in the year search box, I found A Capella’s for Kelly Rowland’s “Can’t Nobody,” Eminem’s “Without Me,” and Nadine’s Eurdance banger “Because the Night.”
Another way of searching Discogs is to search by artist. For example, searching “A Capella” in the Track Title and “Eminem” in the Artist search fields yields 20 results. Searching for “A Cappella” and “Eminem” yields another 56 results.
(Unfortunately some releases spell it A Capella, while others spell it A Cappella, and I haven’t found an easy way to search for both terms at the same time.)
Since Discogs is comprehensive (for label releases), if a specific capella you search for does not come up that means no a cappella of that song/ artist officially exists, and so any copy you find online is either a leak (at best), or a an extraction (at worst).
Searching for A Cap(p)ellas in this way guarantees high quality and comprehensive search results, although questions of copyright are another beast entirely of course…
When it comes to actually getting .mp3s or .flacs of those files, we all have our methods, of course…
The archivist in me really wants to get going and build a small library for future remixes…
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