Music mixing software.

[flobadob]

Is there any good programs out there where you can take a song and mess about with it, adding and taking bits away and whatnot?

[squarebear]

No such thing, unless you have the separate parts of the track, drums, bass, vocals etc. If you have those, you could try Fruityloops or Reason.

You may get answers saying it is possible but don't believe them. I have yet to hear anything like a professional result by people applying filters etc to a mixed track.

Once a track is mixed together, you cannot take one part out of it. It's like baking a cake then trying to take the flour out!

[MarkRae]

Squarebear is correct.

[flobadob]

Aw.

[MarkRae]

Just to clarify, you can't take bits away but you can of course add bits...

E.g. if I felt that the one thing missing from "Love Me Do" was a bit of good ol' prog rock Mellotron choir, I'd fire up Cubase, stick the CD in, import the song, add a new track, point it a the M-Tron VST, hit "Record" and play along.

This of course doesn't alter the original...

[flobadob]

What do DJs do to tracks? Do they get the original parts as talked about above and alter them?

[MarkRae]

> i thought but i may be wrong that ableton would let you do this?

No it wouldn't.

Once the various individual tracks which make a piece of music have been mixed down into stereo or even 5.1, they are not stored separately in the resulting WAV / MP3 or whatever.

Which means that they can't subsequently be extracted and separated - it's a one-way process...

[MarkRae]

> What do DJs do to tracks? Do they get the original parts as talked about above and alter them?

Usually. Sometimes they make it sound like they've extracted individual parts by use of filters and graphic equalisers, but if they don't have the original parts separately the most they can realistically do is to add bits...

[MarkRae]

> play them over other tracks

That's correct, as I said. All decent music software will permit existing tracks to be imported and additional tracks to be layered over them...

[MarkRae]

Not without the original individual parts...

[flobadob]

I'm surprised there's nothing that lets you fade out part of a track, or are you saying that can be done?

[flobadob]

I do have that somewhere. But I can't seem to just end up with an mp3 at the end, I always end up having to take the end product and convert it back to mp3 elsewhere.

[MarkRae]

When the individual tracks are mixed down to an MP3 for download or a WAV to be burnt onto a CD, they are all combined into one file and there is no way to extract them back out.

I'm not sure how I can explain this any more simply...

[beso]

Tracks can be supressed or enhanced with tricks like subtracting on channel from the other. This takes out balanced centre sounds and is sometimes used to remove the lead vocals for a kareoke type effect. Subtracting or adding this sound to or from one of the channels produces another effect.

Filters applied on limited frequency bands can change the parts that are removed.

Filters can be applied to a one band of frequencies based on the frequency characteristics of another band and/or track. This is used in talkback radio where the hosts voice automatically cuts the volume of the callers input.

So for example a tinkle of a bell on the right track could be detected by a strong high frequency component. This could be used to supress low another band such as a bass guitar on the left track by cutting low frequencies.