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Hi all. I was wondering if there are any modern miracle tools for remixing music that you no longer have the multi track version of.

Example. I was revisiting my old band’s 25 year old album. There’s some music I regard as really great but most of the tracks the vocals are too high and the drums could do with some “room sound”. Mostly I really want to reduce the vocal volume and maybe ad some effects.

Are there any tools that can “remix” without the multi track? I assume with all the isolate tracks I see on YouTube there must be some kind of software that do this… hopefully for minimal cost or free

Example track.



This is the worst example, my vocals are stupidly loud and ruin the track



For you uber nerds, we recorded live into an ancient Neve desk with a couple of crappy old Philips stereo speakers rigged up as monitors, it had all the hyper sort after value modules, at a now default TV station in Christchurch New Zealand. Evidently one of the guys from ACDC now own it.
Overdubs at another studio, gear nerds wet dream...

I've never tried it but the demo seems promising.

https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx/ ... tlN3e9NMNb

You can get a 30 day full-functioning demo of Steinberg's Spectralayers that can separate the stems:

https://www.steinberg.net/spectralayers/

Very simple to use: load in your track, hit 'unmix song' and it'll give you stems for vocals, guitar, bass, drums, and 'other'. You can then take that drum track, hit 'unmix drums', and it'll give you separate kick, snare, cymbals and hihat tracks.

You can either rebalance these stems within Spectralayers or bounce them out to remix in your DAW of choice.

If you listen to any of these stems solo'd, you'll hear weird watery artifacts, like little bits of the cymbals in the guitar tracks, stuff like that. Shit will sound weird in solo, but if you put all the stems back together, they do indeed null with the original file down to at least -100dbfs, which is plenty good enough for this sort of thing.

If you just want to adjust some levels, turn the vocals down or whatever, no problem at all. Some eq is probably also ok. But if you're doing anything non-linear, compression, saturation, tape sim, whatever, you can COMPLETELY FUCK IT ALL UP, the phase relationship between the stems will go crazy and it'll sound really awful. So be very careful, you can't just remix with abandon like you could with an actual multitrack.

I only know any of this cause I saw a video of Andrew Scheps talking about how great Spectralayers was. I thought "I wonder if it can find any bass on And Justice For All", so I got the demo and gave it a shot. Turns out, it can. There actually is bass guitar on that record, it's just totally buried. So anyway I made myself my own special AJFA remix, with less Lars, some Jason, A LOT more James and a little echo for poor bone-dry Kirk.

Yeah there are a bunch of AI driven stem separator utilities these days. I've never used one but I've watched a few videos. They all seem to be able to separate things well enough to do like a karaoke mix or something, but I don't know if they do a well enough job to "improve" on the source material. Matter of time though with how good the algorithms are getting. Izotope Ozone and RX can probably do a lot for you. If there is one package I would tell people to buy and never buy another plugin (aside form SFX stuff like reverbs and space echos), it might be RX and Ozone.

Thanks so much folks.

MoreSpaceEcho, I’d love to heard your AJFJ mix. I’ve heard a couple over the years and thought they were an improvement.

Gramsci wrote: Wed Apr 23, 2025 3:48 pm Thanks so much folks.

MoreSpaceEcho, I’d love to heard your AJFJ mix. I’ve heard a couple over the years and thought they were an improvement.

+1

Yes, yes, yes, please, if willing and able to share.

jfv wrote: Wed Apr 23, 2025 3:54 pm

Gramsci wrote: Wed Apr 23, 2025 3:48 pm Thanks so much folks.

MoreSpaceEcho, I’d love to heard your AJFJ mix. I’ve heard a couple over the years and thought they were an improvement.

+1

Yes, yes, yes, please, if willing and able to share.

I would also love to hear this!

I just realized that the previous posts didn't tag the original author.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Wed Apr 23, 2025 10:52 am I thought "I wonder if it can find any bass on And Justice For All", so I got the demo and gave it a shot. Turns out, it can. There actually is bass guitar on that record, it's just totally buried. So anyway I made myself my own special AJFA remix, with less Lars, some Jason, A LOT more James and a little echo for poor bone-dry Kirk.

FM MoreSpaceEcho, tag, you're it...! A few of us wanna hear this!

jfv wrote: Thu Apr 24, 2025 2:19 pm I just realized that the previous posts didn't tag the original author.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Wed Apr 23, 2025 10:52 am I thought "I wonder if it can find any bass on And Justice For All", so I got the demo and gave it a shot. Turns out, it can. There actually is bass guitar on that record, it's just totally buried. So anyway I made myself my own special AJFA remix, with less Lars, some Jason, A LOT more James and a little echo for poor bone-dry Kirk.

FM MoreSpaceEcho, tag, you're it...! A few of us wanna hear this!

There already exists a remix of And Justice that someone did years ago that brought the bass up. Anyone here remember it?

jfv wrote: Thu Apr 24, 2025 2:19 pm FM MoreSpaceEcho, tag, you're it...! A few of us wanna hear this!

I'm working on it right now, stay tuned!