Isolating Pre-recorded Music Tracks?

[mike529]

Ever since I've listened to music, I've always loved playing with the balance control. Hearing different instruments or vocals isolated to one side. Great way to hear things you never noticed before too.

I've always wished there were a way for the listener to isolate a guitar track or cut out the vocals, listen to only bass and drums...etc.

Haven't thought about this in awhile but, with the new technology of today, is there a device or software program that can do this now?

How cool would it be, to be able to listen to a song in it's full form, and then one by one mute each instrument/vocal out until you have only one or none left...or the other way around...build it up peice by peice until it's a full song!

Would be great if there was a program that could do this or if the record companies would release cd's with this capabilty. Put the disk in your computer and a screen pops up with icons for each instrument/vocal, clicking on each would turn it on/off.

I guess I'm just dreaming...dont know how many people would actually want something like this? I would love it! Would also be a good way to breath some new life into music I've grown tired of over the years. A new way to listen to it.

Mike

[AT]

There are definitely ways of isolating the frequencies of specific voices/instruments and then eliminating them in order to better hear the other pieces of the song. It's not perfect, but is something fun to play around with. Also, with 5.1 mixes (and soon 7.1) more instruments are being sent to more places--which means more chances to listen to "divided up" sections of the mix.

The technology you're describing, however, is the very technology used to multi-track the music in the first place. Many years ago it was a breakthrough to have magnetic tape divided up into sections so as to have simultaneous playback and recording on seperate tracks. (There's a great documentary DVD called "Tom Dowd, The Language of Music." Dowd was an innovative engineer from the 50s all the way until his death who recorded more well-known hits from well-known artists than I can remember right now. It's an interesting watch for those who'd like to know the process and devlopment of recording technologies.) Fast forward to the present, and the process of multi-tracking is done primarily on computers using virtual mock-ups of the former analog equipment. Indeed each track is isolated and can be manipulated more than ever.

Consider getting into recording.

[darthadv]

a layman's ability to do it has been experimented with a program called UMIXIT... a year or two ago, there were a bunch of music cd's that were released that had this program on it, along with a few of the songs being available as multi-track files... artists that come to mind were aerosmith (the last live record?) and billy joel (the latest box set)... i'm not an engineer, but i can say that the program is nowhere near being a "professional" tool...