Practicing with demixed tracks

Auspicious

Auspicious

Silver Member
Hello, it's been a while since my last publication on DW but this is it today.

Around 2022 or maybe 2023 there was a thread about the fabulous AI demixer Moises app.. Back then, I tried to practice against tracks with the drum removed.. around the end of 2022 or 2023 and I didn't like it.. then I simply spent a year (or more) playing along with the complete real tracks until about 2 weeks ago, something happened, a meltdown.

It happened at the job. There, I listen to the music while working, listening to jazz all the time. And I said it to myself, I should remove that 🤬 drummer from that tracks, in fact he annoys me on every tracks I practice, his playing is ruining the music, his cymbals sound like crap, he plays too hard, he increase the tempo of tunes on it's turn, I really hate that drummer. :mad:

I wrote a E-mail rant about the specific drummer to a colleague of mine, listing everything I dislike about him and this lead me to remember that I have Spleeter GUI installed my computer.

I decided to strip the drums out of all of my practicing tracks (85 total) using Spleeter GUI (The desktop app which is far inferior to online Moises but still cool and 100% annonymous) It took many millenniums of human evolution to create a tool capable of removing an instrument from a mix, for me it's the most incredible AI achievement so far. (I started using Copilot at the job too, to compare products to read about products for me and summerize, I love it)

***
So I've been practicing my jazz tunes without the drums for the past 2 days and it's changing totally everything in the way I play, especially for the solo parts, the trading parts between the drums and other instruments. My solos, what I do is so much more fluent and fun without the original drum track in my ears, it's incredible the feeling of freedom.

All that because of technology. I don't even use a Cellphone, but demixing (y)The power to extract a pianist, from the other musicians from a 60 years old recording, who could have imagined THAT?

o_O

Have you started using it yet? The rise of the machines!
 
I can't tell if you are secretly the creator of this app and this is an advertisement in disguise but it's an interesting topic.

Yes a lot of drummers in recordings were late teens/early 20's when their band made it big and their inexperience is ingrained in those recordings forever, it is inconvenient when we practice their mistakes and inherit them, sometimes best to stay away.

Lots of tracks are hard to practice with the drums removed (and no click) because the vocalist is the loudest thing in the mix and their time is very free. My strategy is to be able to play with a metronome on just the 1, and then be able to discern a note on the bass or guitar or piano and learn to use that particular note to mark the time and play along e.g Bass always hits the 1 and 1+ at the beginning of each bar - that becomes your click.

You can find the instrumental versions of plenty of famous tracks on youtube. You can imagine lots of bands recorded their parts in this format or at least without the vocals dominating and so we are being pretty hard on ourselves when we aren't working with the same conditions as them.

If the drummer is actually awesome I have started looking for the isolated drum tracks, and I have made a playlist on my laptop with the following:
i) The original album version
ii) The drumless track
iii) The instrumental version
iv) The isolated drum track,
v) A video play along of the chart like this:
vi) I will use the tap function on a metronome to get the tempo of the song so I can play the part all by itself.

It's probably overkill/sucking the fun out of life but there's just some songs out there that I can't nail after years of just "playing along" and this seems to really help me.
 
@Duck Tape haha no I am not the creator of the app, and not related to these people, I can't code or anything like that. I'm just enthusiastic about the technology.

I practiced my tracks with drums for some time, if I can play them against the drumless track, it's because of the previous practice with drums. Some tracks I know less, I need to practice against the full tracks.

I also practice Jazz pieces of music, mostly without vocals, the comping is pretty much only improvisation, never the same thing twice. For the solos it's the same thing, it's always different, It's a great feeling of freedom when the drum track is out, instead of trying to follow the general idea of the original drummer, I can wander around without conflict between what I play and what the drummer in the recording plays, it's possible to really trying to deploy my own vocabulary in the context. :)

It gives me the opportunity to play whatever I want around the piano and bass, this is what I like.

***
I like what you show me in your video, never tried to practice a song with a dynamic chart on video. In a song like Peg, at least with a tool like that, the drum part can be identical with the original. It's a good song too :)

Thanks for showing me the video and sharing your ideas, it's going to be useful eventually.
 
These days I often either play with drum loops via YouTube, playing against as much as with the drum loop, or with drumless tracks, again just via YouTube. Because I'm not practicing for a gig, I don't worry much about recreating/matching the original drum part, but just try to come up with something that I think fits and is tasteful and interesting.

I wish I'd had these tools available when I was a teenager, but am also glad we have them now.
 
@GretschedHive Practicing without the drum track is giving me a challenge to integrate new tastefull and interesting stuff! I noticed this today as I play far less subdivisions then what isthe original drum track.. it's pushing me to step up my playing, to think faster and to think about playing something musical instead of playing mechanically by muscle memory.

I realized during the last 2 days that I am at the point where I need to improve my speed on distributing triplets around the kit, this will greatly improve the quality of my fills. I clearly noticed that in a no drum track situation.

This is fun.. really, this is fun.
 
Duck Tape said:
Yes a lot of drummers in recordings were late teens/early 20's when their band made it big and their inexperience is ingrained in those recordings forever, it is inconvenient when we practice their mistakes and inherit them, sometimes best to stay away.
Click to expand...
I find that very rare. Most records had record producers. The music was played over and over and only a good take was ever accepted. In the 80's I replaced band drummers on records because the drummer couldn't cut it to the standard required and the producer decided someone else would do a better job.
The absolute best thing about playing along to music with the original drums is to learn and analyse why the drummer played what he/she played. Whatever they played was OK'ed by the producer and the record company. And that's a valuable learning experience.
I would use a demixer in order to make music videos for Youtube. I usually want to remove my own drums from the records I appeared on.
If it's just practice I would do both, practice with the original drummer, then practice without. If you only ever practice without it's harder to know if you are overplaying - too many drum fills, too many cymbal crashes.
 
GretschedHive said:
I don't worry much about recreating/matching the original drum part, but just try to come up with something that I think fits and is tasteful and interesting.
Click to expand...
Playing along with the original drummer is a learning experience. Why did they play what they played?
That was hugely valuable when I was a teenager. It taught me to build the song from beginning to end. Tighter hi-hat at the start, simpler fills. More open playing with more noticeable fills in guitar solos and outros.
 
The other thing about playing along with original drummers is learning how to cope with playing ahead of the beat, on the beat, or behind it - and picking your own style up along the way. It's surprising the amount of YouTube drummers playing along to tunes fairly oblivious to a perceptible flam effect on the snare beats.
 
I play along with the original drummer but it gets annoying after some time, eventually it's really liberating to remove the original drummer using the current technology. :sneaky:

When I try to play the drums, I like to listen to the piano or the trumpet and I trying to improvise around that in peace.

My problem is more about underplaying then overplaying right now, playing too much is not my problem. As for the producers and disc company.. I don't know what to say, I'd be tempted to say :mad: the producers and recording house, without too much arguments other then thinking that it's art and only I can decide if it's good or bad.
 
Chris Whitten said:
I find that very rare. Most records had record producers. The music was played over and over and only a good take was ever accepted. In the 80's I replaced band drummers on records because the drummer couldn't cut it to the standard required and the producer decided someone else would do a better job.
The absolute best thing about playing along to music with the original drums is to learn and analyse why the drummer played what he/she played. Whatever they played was OK'ed by the producer and the record company. And that's a valuable learning experience.
I would use a demixer in order to make music videos for Youtube. I usually want to remove my own drums from the records I appeared on.
If it's just practice I would do both, practice with the original drummer, then practice without. If you only ever practice without it's harder to know if you are overplaying - too many drum fills, too many cymbal crashes.
Click to expand...

Yep. I think we can still find mistakes, bad choices or bad performances in some recordings but I think you’re right, most drum parts are vetted and given the OK by producers.
 
Chris Whitten said:
Playing along with the original drummer is a learning experience. Why did they play what they played?
That was hugely valuable when I was a teenager. It taught me to build the song from beginning to end. Tighter hi-hat at the start, simpler fills. More open playing with more noticeable fills in guitar solos and outros.
Click to expand...
Absolutely. 100%. Did that for my formative years. If I were going to be covering those songs in a live situation, I'd do it again now as well. But I'm not, so I don't, currently finding it more intellectually stimulating and just plain fun to see what I could possibly bring to the table. (The answer is...not as much as the original drummer.)
 
@Chris Whitten

I made some recordings of my playing today and I find it amazing to hear overplaying in what I do. Too much snare in the comping, it's compromising the harmony with the instruments.

Thanks for talking to me about overplaying, it's good to know.
 
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