Musical program for the PC question

[superdave]

Is there a computer program available that lets you remove certain parts of a song so that you can hear only the part you want to listen to? Example, I've been learning "Shed Some Light" by Shinedown. I would like to remove the vocals and the cello part of the song so that I can clearly hear the guitar parts. It's not a difficult song but I would like to listen the guitar and try to play along with it to get the timing right.

[AlChuck]

Not really. There are some tricks that can be done depending on how something has been mixed, but there's no way you can reverse-engineer the individual tracks once they've been mixed. It's a bit like trying to get the tint back out of the base when you're mixing paints.

[superdave]

What kind of tricks?

[AlChuck]

Well, as an extreme example say the guitar part is all the way on the left channel and nothing else was mixed left. In that case you could simply eliminate the right channel.

 

The more sophisticated thing is to use EQ to attempt to surgically remove cetrain frequencies. This can work to some degree if each of the instruments and voices in the track have most of their energy in narrow frequency ranges that don't overlap with the others. Then you could cut the appropriate band and theoretically isolate that instrument. Trouble is, real instruments don't have such narrow and unique frequencies. There is always a lot of overlap, so if you cut a frequency a lot, you effect the sound of most of the intruments or voices.