Audio Recording Experts

[daepp]

I think I am correct that we only listen to stereo (2 tracks) anymore. I am a huge fan of music and how it's made. I have seen classic rock albums deconstructed by the artists or their producers, where they play just one of the 4 or 16 tracks to show/make a particular point about the piece. I can't get enough of that.

What I want to know is, can this be done without the original multi track tapes? For example, is there a device that can take the available (2) tracks and isolate the individual vocals or instruments?

[daepp]

[daepp]

[daepp]

[nostatic]

You can do some isolation with stereo tracks based on position in the mix and some phase cancellation trickery and/or heavy eq. It is far from clean most of the time though. I use Transcribe for my bass studies and it does some instrument isolation/removal but it is rough at best. Vocals are usually easier to deal with as they tend to be mixed dead center.

[imcarthur]

As Todd says, really no you can't. Without the premix tracks you have to filter the rest out which is never really adequate. And frequently the premix tracks are themselves stems which are already a mini-mix of like mic feeds. And even a main vocal track can be center + some left + right mono to add spread.

Ian