Adobe Audition - Breaking Down Music into Layers?

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Bigredf

Member
Hey guys,

Was wondering if anyone had any experience breaking down a song so that you can isolate just one or so of the instruments in the song?

I'm using a Kevin Macleod song for a scene which I only want the guitar from i.e. not the drums, bass, piano.

Is this possible? I have done some looking around but can't find any tutorials which explain this process.

I am using Adobe Audition for all audio work, but do also have a copy of Audacity if someone knows how to use that too.

Cheers

Sam
 
Bigredf said:
Hey guys,

Was wondering if anyone had any experience breaking down a song so that you can isolate just one or so of the instruments in the song?

I'm using a Kevin Macleod song for a scene which I only want the guitar from i.e. not the drums, bass, piano.

Is this possible? I have done some looking around but can't find any tutorials which explain this process.

I am using Adobe Audition for all audio work, but do also have a copy of Audacity if someone knows how to use that too.

Cheers

Sam
Click to expand...

Kevin's a pretty good guy. You might ask him if he could just provide you with the track you want.
 
What you're asking is not possible.
There is no way to remove certain instrument sounds from a stereo or mono recording.

While there has been software that does an OK job of removing vocals - it does so mainly by EQing them out - so the rest of the recording sounds changed pretty drastically.

To do what you are asking you need the multi-track master recordings or some other form of already-separated "stems" like say: Drums all on one track, then voices all on one track, then guitars on one track, bass on one track, piano on one track - you get the picture.

Recently you may have been hearing lots of well-known songs with certain instrument tracks removed from the song - or you hear only one certain instrument track from the song. And you may have wondered how this was done. Most of it has come from the video game GUITAR HERO. That software has all of its songs in multi-track form like I described, and clever folks have been ripping those individual tracks out from their hidden location in the video game software.
But this obviously only works for the songs contained in the game.
 
DPStewart said:
What you're asking is not possible.
There is no way to remove certain instrument sounds from a stereo or mono recording.

While there has been software that does an OK job of removing vocals - it does so mainly by EQing them out - so the rest of the recording sounds changed pretty drastically.

To do what you are asking you need the multi-track master recordings or some other form of already-separated "stems" like say: Drums all on one track, then voices all on one track, then guitars on one track, bass on one track, piano on one track - you get the picture.

Recently you may have been hearing lots of well-known songs with certain instrument tracks removed from the song - or you hear only one certain instrument track from the song. And you may have wondered how this was done. Most of it has come from the video game GUITAR HERO. That software has all of its songs in multi-track form like I described, and clever folks have been ripping those individual tracks out from their hidden location in the video game software.
But this obviously only works for the songs contained in the game.
Click to expand...

I was actually a QA tester on Guiter Hero: World Tour and Guitar Hero: Metallica, and we had copies of the master tapes/PT sessions (depending on how old the music was). This is why some bands, like Led Zeppelin, would never be in a guitar hero game. They refused to give over copies of the masters.

You cannot do what the OP is asking. You'll have to contact whoever has the master recordings and ask for what you are looking for.
 
davefisk said:
I was actually a QA tester on Guiter Hero: World Tour and Guitar Hero: Metallica, and we had copies of the master tapes/PT sessions (depending on how old the music was). This is why some bands, like Led Zeppelin, would never be in a guitar hero game. They refused to give over copies of the masters.

You cannot do what the OP is asking. You'll have to contact whoever has the master recordings and ask for what you are looking for.
Click to expand...

Wow. You had your hands on some pretty precious stuff there Dave!
 
Well, like many things it kind of depends.

It is on the fringes of possible. You need to use a program called Melodyne, the expensive version. It can sort of, if the gods are smiling, pull apart a mixed piece of music. It's designed to do that to be able to pitch and play with parts of a piece so I'm not sure how usable an extracted part in the bare is going to sound, but...

It is pretty crazy that it works at all, but it does fairly well.

So the real answer is maybe IF you have a lot of time and money to toss at it. But it would probably be a lot cheaper to get permission to use the original track.

It should also be pointed out that extracting a part does not remove it from copyright protection. So legally you need to get those rights anyway.

Cheaper and probably easier is to get the music rights (printed as opposed to to recorded) and have a good guitarist just play the part you want.
 
DPStewart said:
Wow. You had your hands on some pretty precious stuff there Dave!
Click to expand...

There are some interesting multi track master tapes that have shown up on the internet. There are a bunch of extracted "GH" tracks, but the much more interesting ones are 8 - 16 track masters from folks like Marvin Gaye.
 
DPStewart said:
Wow. You had your hands on some pretty precious stuff there Dave!
Click to expand...

I actually never saw or messed with the copies of the master recordings. I was just a tester. I took the gig because Neversoft was close to where I lived and I was really really good at GH at the time and they needed testers on "expert" mode and I was out of work for a lot of 2008. We were sequestered in our own area of the studio in the warehouse next to the MOCAP stage, but because of that we met the members of Metallica when they came in to do Mocap for the game. If you have GH: Metallica you can see in the bonus features where Lars is struggling to play the Intro of "Shortest Straw". I was in another part of the warehouse listening to that happen as they shot that video, sitting there thinking "I'm a drummer. I can nail this part. Just let me go over there and do it for him".

Some people who went to school a lot longer than I did managed to crack the GH games and pull out the individual tracks from them. I couldn't begin to tell you how that's done. The really interesting thing is the tracks are basically re-mixed in the game because they have to do things like raise and lower levels and put effects on certain tracks in real time depending on what's going on in the game, so they needed complete control over everything. Because of this, the mix of Metallica's "Death Magnetic" in the game, which was available as DLC for GH: World Tour, sounded better than the actual album because the album was distorted. People actually complained about it when the album came out..."Hey! This is all distorted and sounds fine in GH".

Anyway..sorry for the offramp from the OP.
 
Appreciate the help again guys!

Still learning about this sort of thing as I am new to the industry, and sounds a hard method to do.

Thanks for Kevin's website, I'll ask him about it.

Thanks again

Sam
 
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