Music: Isolating tracks

grendel824_

Okay, my music lexicon is a bit limited - I've played in some bands with near-competence, and I love listening to the stuff, but bear with me if I don't put this as succinctly as possible. I recently watched a "Classic Albums" episode on VH1 where a producer fiddled with the board in order to highlight certain tracks and silence others. I found this profoundly cool, and I'm wondering if there are any ways to make use of the technices that silence certain tracks and highlight others - I find it very fascinating. The only way I've found to accomplish this is to use earphones and plug them in half-way to isolate tracks, but it's kinda random and unreliable. Does anybody know any easy way to isolate tracks (ie: just vocals, bassline, backups, etc) without shelling out 10,000 for a mixing board? Do you have to have the original reel to really get that done, or will commericial CDs work? Thanks in advance!

Scosglen

I'm no expert, but I'm fairly certain it's impossible to isolate tracks with any kind of practicality from a final, mixed piece of music. You would need the original masters to do this.

EggyToast

He isolated tracks because, as a producer, he had access to all of the individually recorded tracks prior to the final mix to a single stereo track.

There are a few tools that claim to "remove vocals" that work by phase cancellation and the fact that most vocals are directly in the center of the stereo field. Even if they worked well for a song, you'd then have to do the opposite to snag vocals, and then you'd still only just be able to adjust the vocal levels.

A mixing board by itself won't do it -- you need to have the original, unmixed masters from a particular band or group you like. Some bands have actually put versions of things out -- Nine Inch Nails comes to mind. It's the only way to do what you're talking about, short of making your own music.

Khavall

There's really only one way to do this well, and that's been said, you have to have the source tracks.

Short basic lesson on sound that's a little oversimplified:

Sound is, as you know, the result of a difference in pressure in the air. If the disturbance is a regular pressure differential, then it takes on a pitch. So while it's commonly thought that vibration is required, that's not quite true, it simple requires a regular disturbance of the air. The disturbance is translated to sound when it causes vibration in your ear. When multiple sounds are around, the pressure differences are in essence combined. Therefore any collection of different sound waves, or disturbances, can be simplified into a single wave, which is the sum of the waves which make it up. Noise canceling headphones work by producing the negative version of an incoming wave, so the resultant wave is nil.

So when you're listening to music, you're listening to a single wave, which is the sum of all of the instruments sounds. You're not listening to different instruments playing, you're listening to the combination of the different instruments. When mixing the mixer deals with each specific track, so they can cause one to have more weight in the final wave. But the end result is then compressed into one wave, because it's a lot cheaper and easier to store a digital version of a single wave than it is to store a digital version of 5+ waves. So if you were to open an mp3 or a .wav of a music file from a CD in an audio editing program, you'll get a single track, because that's what the song is stored as: a single track. In order to get multiple tracks, you would need to have the source recordings of each track.

The isolation that you get when you plug headphones in partially is probably because you're then only receiving a signal from one stereo channel.