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Topic: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover? (Read 3214 times) previous topic - next topic
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How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?
There must be software or something that can separate and remove instruments part from songs, like drums or bass so that they'd be able to do the bass or drum cover of that song while it's playing..

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #1 –
Not sure if I understood your question correctly.

If you refer to recordings where one person played several instruments and did the singing (e.g. Lenny Kravitz), then the answer is: by multi-track recording, building up the song track by track (read more on Wikipedia).
Replacing one track later (e.g. a pro drummer replacing a drum synth track) is technically easy if tracks were recorded in isolation. It's hard to impossible if a band was recorded as a whole.

If this wasn't what you wondered about, try rephrasing your question.

Cheers
Kaspar

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #2 –
I believe maybe OP is asking about "extracting" the guitar/drums/etc track from the mix, so that someone who tries to play along on guitar or drums can hear more clearly what is going on.

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #3 –
What I meant is that some people say it's hard to split the vocals from the song, and it's impossible to split guitar solo or bass or drums. But in youtube, we say thousands of people doing a bass cover of a song or a drum cover where they're playing drums or bass guitar which means they could be able to split bass or drums from the song.

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #4 –
They do it by listening.

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #5 –
You can buy recordings where an instrument is omitted, so you can play along with a professional backing. Companies like Music Minus One and websites like Guitar Instructor, for instance. It's like a Karaoke track, only for instrumentalists. They aren't the original recordings, but professional facsimiles.
http://www.guitarinstructor.com/jamtracks/

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: JabbaThePrawn on
You can buy recordings where an instrument is omitted, so you can play along with a professional backing. Companies like Music Minus One and websites like Guitar Instructor, for instance. It's like a Karaoke track, only for instrumentalists. They aren't the original recordings, but professional facsimiles.
http://www.guitarinstructor.com/jamtracks/


That's what I meant. Are you sure that they all really do that? I mean are you sure there's no way to do splitting in the original recording?

And Is there any way other than buying these recordings? Like doing the thing myself.

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #7 –
Quote
Are you sure that they all really do that? I mean are you sure there's no way to do splitting in the original recording?
"You can't un-fry an egg or un-bake a cake, and you can't un-mix a song."    In science, this is known as an irreversible process.

Of course, you can separate the left & right channels (or all six channels in a 5.1 surround recording) and you can do some "tricks" such as subtracting left & right to remove the "center channel" vocals, etc. 

The reason pros record in multi-track (or even in stereo) is so that each instrument & vocal can be edited & processed independently, and mixed as desired.    Otherwise, you could just set-up one microphone and record in mono and then split-up and edit later.

Bands have been doing covers long before there was any digital technology.    Sometimes you can buy the sheet music or a "fake book" but as has been said, it's mostly done "by ear".

 

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #8 –
Of course, there is an easy explanation for those songs which are featured in Guitar Hero / Rock Band. They have multitrack versions licensed off from the record companies. I do not know to what extent they are the original multitracks, or re-recordings.

One famous example: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/fans-complain-after-death-magnetic-sounds-better-on-guitar-hero-than-cd-20080918

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #9 –
Quote from: Radioheader on
Quote from: JabbaThePrawn on
You can buy recordings where an instrument is omitted, so you can play along with a professional backing. Companies like Music Minus One and websites like Guitar Instructor, for instance. It's like a Karaoke track, only for instrumentalists. They aren't the original recordings, but professional facsimiles.
http://www.guitarinstructor.com/jamtracks/


That's what I meant. Are you sure that they all really do that? I mean are you sure there's no way to do splitting in the original recording?

And Is there any way other than buying these recordings? Like doing the thing myself.
If you do a few searches for phrases like 'jam tracks' or 'backing tracks' or 'guitar play along', you will probably find some free downloads. Maybe not the one for the song you want to cover, but if you trawl through enough sites, you never know.

If you are a bass player, I suppose you could turn down the bass with tone controls or EQ while playing the original track. But you'd also lose the lower frequencies of other instruments (the larger drums, the keyboards) and it'd probably sound a bit rubbish.

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #10 –
Some software like Celemony Melodyne and zynaptiq: UNMIX::DRUMS can "unmix" a song to a certain extent. Of course they will use some easy songs in their demo videos but once you have the actual product and try them with different songs you will realize the truth.

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #11 –
Most of the covers I've heard just play the original track in the background at a lower volume compared to their PA or whatever they use while playing.
While doing a bass cover, one could maybe EQ the original base out (together with the bass drum, unfortunately).

Re: How could some people do guitar solos, bass and drums cover?

Reply #12 –
Quote from: bennetng on
Some software like Celemony Melodyne and zynaptiq: UNMIX::DRUMS can "unmix" a song to a certain extent. Of course they will use some easy songs in their demo videos but once you have the actual product and try them with different songs you will realize the truth.
Yep. The Beatles Rockband was created this way. The individual unmixed parts can sound quite nasty in isolation, but good enough in the context of the game. They used the original multitracks as the source, but with only 4 tracks available back then, there was often bass + drums, or multiple guitars, on a single track, which they had to "unmix".

There have been some creative fan-made "fake stereo" versions of mono songs around for at least a decade. Many of these are made by partial unmixing. It started by using noise reduction tools to separate things out other than actual noise, and grew from there.

Cheers,
David.