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I want to be able to take any song from any source, and remove the drums so that I can practice, and possibly play my own interpretation. Is there an specific software package to do this? I see a lot of You-tube drummers play cover songs with an audio track and their own drums.

Th

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    Possible duplicate of Is there any way in Audacity I can remove a backing track from a guitar performance? – Legorhin Oct 22 at 21:25
  • not an exact copy but there are many questions asking how to remove tracks, which is technically infeasible with current technology. Youtube people make their own audio tracks or find songs that have individual tracks released. – Legorhin Oct 22 at 21:26
  • One way that I used to resort to when I was a percussionist was to find Guitar Pro tabs and export them to MIDI with the drum track silenced. If you run a MIDI file through a DAW or a sequence of synthesisers, you can make it sound close to the original. Like the others have said, there is no easy way, unless the band released their track as separate instrument recordings. – Pyromonk Oct 23 at 2:29
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    Can't be done - yet! There are drumless tracks available, rather like there are lots of backing tracks for budding lead guitarists. Try Music Minus One. To create your own you'll have to play and record all other parts, and run the track. – Tim Oct 23 at 7:41
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Izotope Music Rebalance can go some way towards removing drums, vocals, etc.

It's not perfect, but it is the current 'state of the art'.

Entry level price $399 - not cheap.

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The DrumExtract VST is 49 € and includes a dial to fade between percussion-only and pitched notes only, this is a quick demo video:

Main site with features overview: https://www.yellownoiseaudio.com

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  • That plugin seems to be separating sustained sounds from short "percussive" ones. Not that the demo music is electronic, and only consists of very sustained "pads" and drums (a little bit of a bassline too). I doubt it would do as clean a job on other more natural musical sources. – danmcb Oct 25 at 7:30
  • Yes, its effectiveness would vary by the timbre of the sounds, as they state in the product description. But short of getting your hands on the individual tracks, this type of many-close-pitches-at-once (percussion) vs few-sustained-strong-pitches (melodic instruments) is the only way to accomplish this kind of Fourier analysis-driven voice splitting. And since it allows you to manually set the threshold for the frequency strength to split the signal, I don't see any room for improvement. I'd be interested in playing with it on really pitchy percussion though, like resonant tom-toms or timpani – user63785 Oct 25 at 22:30

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