I am trying to create take a song and take out the lyrics and keep the instrumentals
I'm not sure of what you mean, but supposing you want to have just the instruments and not the voices staves on an existing file (midi you import, or nwc), the simpler is to mute the voices staves.
Simply type M and check which staves you don't want to hear.
(you also could delete the staves you don't want, but this is irreversible when you have saved and closed the file.)
HTH
Assuming you don't want to see or hear the lyric staves, first go to the tools menu and select 'mute list'. Click on the check boxes next to the lyric staves to mute them.
To remove the lyric staves visually, go to the file menu and select 'page setup' and under the 'contents tab' click on the check boxes for the staves you want to see. This way the lyric staves will remain part of the file, just won't be visible or heard.
However, if there are tempo changes in muted staves, they will actually have effect (yes, even when muted).
The same goes for Fermata and breath marks.
IIRC, when exporting to midi, breath marks and fermataes are not "exported".
That's why I had talked about deleting the staves :) Just don't save your file in that case!
PS. This is so until current version (1.70.10) and may change later.
patience/yung/illmatic