Multi passes of Music Source Separation Tools

[zeerround]

Has anybody experimented with multiple passes of the same or different Music Source Separation Methods?

For instance. I used Lalal.ai to split out an acoustic guitar stem but it had some lead electric guitar in it along with some of the higher bass notes.

I took that stem, and used it as the source to do another electric guitar stem, and then the "no electric guitar" stem from that, as the source for a bass stem extraction.

The final no bass stem became the acoustic guitar source for my up-remix, and the two (original and 2nd pass) electric guitar stems and the two bass stems were mixed together to become the electric guitar and bass stem sources.

I hope that's clear.

I did get an improvement but not a 100% fix. I was too lazy to keep going or to try other tools beyond lalal.ai (who else has electric and acoustic guitar stems?

Anybody tackled this?

 

[smokey911]

I've been using DeMix Pro for source separation. I've had mixed results doing multiple pases for individual instruments.
Some have worked very well, while others require a lot work by hand in a spectral editor like Spectralayers
However doing a second pass on the vocals separates the lead from the harmony very well in most cases.

 

[zeerround]

Interesting. Thanks. It would have never occurred to me that multiple passes with vocals would split lead from backing/harmony. In my case I am upmixing the vocal stems so based on the stereo mix the backing/harmonies usually end up in different channels anyway.

 

[marpow]

Question: Is it not true that when a band is playing in studio and even though the instuments are hooked up seperately to the multi track board there is a small amount of bleed over from the other instruments?

 

[zeerround]

If "hooked up" means not mic'd then no, no bleed. If playing live (all at the same time in the same room) and mic'd then potentially yes. But for music source separation it wouldn't matter. The AI "learns" what an instrument sounds like, then pulls just that sound out of the mix.

So you are not splitting a mix back into the original multi-tracks, but into different instrument types.

E.g. you could have 3 multi-tracks of what becomes over-dubbed guitars. An Guitar stem separation will give you one stereo track (called a stem) with all three guitars on it (however they were panned/mixed, in the original stereo mix).

 

[marpow]

If "hooked up" means not mic'd then no, no bleed. If playing live (all at the same time in the same room) and mic'd then potentially yes. But for music source separation it wouldn't matter. The AI "learns" what an instrument sounds like, then pulls just that sound out of the mix.

So you are not splitting a mix back into the original multi-tracks, but into different instrument types.

E.g. you could have 3 multi-tracks of what becomes over-dubbed guitars. An Guitar stem separation will give you one stereo track (called a stem) with all three guitars on it (however they were panned/mixed, in the original stereo mix).

Thats great, thank you.