Isolating drums from a song with Audacity
Removing drums from a song has long been the dream of many musicians and music producers!
Drummers are interested in techniques to reduce the volume of drums in a song, but producers and beatmakers who work with samples also want to extract or remove drums from music. The history of sampling goes back to well before 1979 with the Fairchild CMI (one of the first samplers), and well before Daft Punk, and (filtered) house music. Decades before them, Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer already worked with the concept of sampling, as you can hear in this famous 1969 song.
Now ... how to actually remove drums from a song?
During years, isolating drums from a track or extracting a drum kick, snare, or hihat, was done with EQ techniques or "slicing techniques" à la Akai MPC. The process was rather long and complicated, requiring fine manual editing.
Now, thanks to digital processing techniques, you can just use our VST DrumExtract, working for Audacity, and many other DAWs as well:
Here is how to do it:
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First open Audacity
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Open the "Effect" menu, then "DrumExtract":
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Select if you want to extract or remove drums with the main knob.
- Now you have a new sample, that you can re-use for your productions.
How to remove drums from a sample? With the same technique, can also isolate indivudual elements, such as a kick, snare, hihat, and many others.