Stem separation question, can it do what I hope?

Ojustaboo

Hi all, I don’t own any Traktor hardware and I don’t DJ, that said I do have Traktor 2 pro s/w and find it fun to mess around with.

My main music hobby is messing around with synths etc in my Daw.

One thing I’ve wished for, for decades, is a way to import a track from a group and effectively remove say the keyboard/synth/organ so I can try to play along.

Or, just separate the vocals into my Daw, and me having fun creating the rest of the entire song (one thing I can’t do is sing, you really want to hear me try)

I’m talking about tracks from various late 70s and 80s, some punk, some new wave, various others.

If Traktor pro 4 can do that, I’ll happily upgrade.

I also presume I’m right in thinking there must be a big difference between each band member?

For example: a 4 piece band with drums, bass, guitar and vocals being fine to try

A 4 piece band where they are all playing synth, probably impossible? Something like Kraftwerk “The Model” or where most of the band are playing synths like Gary Numan “cars”?

many thanks

lord-carlos

You could download the demo and try it out with songs you like.

If you don't want do dj and just separate the different stems you might be able to find free programs for that.

red_nick

As Carlos mentions, there are plenty of other methods of stem separation. Pretty sure they'll be more useful than Traktor if you're not planning on DJing.

Online: Gaudio studio or LALAL.AI

Applications: izotope RX11 (might be overkill for just stem separation), deemucs

There are many more.

They're not going to separate band members, usually just: drums, bass, melody or other, vocals

Simon A. Billington

As Red suggested…

The stem separating algorithms are lifted directly from iZotope RX which is only capable of breaking audio down into Drums, Bass, Vocals and Other.

The quality of its results will depend highly on the material you feed it. For example, I heard that it had a hard time with classical music. In my personal experience, it seemed to have a hard time with dub style basses with it being broken between the bass and other stems. Background vocals and huge vocal reverb washes would often end up in other too. This would make it hard to remove vocals and drop something else in its place, as an example.

Sadly, the only thing that still guarantees good stem separation is getting hold of the original files from the artist/engineer.

lord-carlos

You could download the demo and try it out with songs you like.

If you don't want do dj and just separate the different stems you might be able to find free programs for that.

Ojustaboo

Doh, didn’t think of trying the demo

thanks

red_nick

As Carlos mentions, there are plenty of other methods of stem separation. Pretty sure they'll be more useful than Traktor if you're not planning on DJing.

Online: Gaudio studio or LALAL.AI

Applications: izotope RX11 (might be overkill for just stem separation), deemucs

There are many more.

They're not going to separate band members, usually just: drums, bass, melody or other, vocals

Simon A. Billington

As Red suggested…

The stem separating algorithms are lifted directly from iZotope RX which is only capable of breaking audio down into Drums, Bass, Vocals and Other.

The quality of its results will depend highly on the material you feed it. For example, I heard that it had a hard time with classical music. In my personal experience, it seemed to have a hard time with dub style basses with it being broken between the bass and other stems. Background vocals and huge vocal reverb washes would often end up in other too. This would make it hard to remove vocals and drop something else in its place, as an example.

Sadly, the only thing that still guarantees good stem separation is getting hold of the original files from the artist/engineer.