I’m in the midst of a yearslong demixing project of a few dozen 1966 tapes/slave tapes.
One of the tracks …which I’ve demixed into separate instruments/vocals… is currently getting my attention on the mono close-mic’d drumkit isolation.
The Spectralayers unmix drums doesn’t work at all on this particular kit…which didn’t surprise me.
What I am able to do in Nuendo…manually and slowly…is to copy the drumkit to a new track and then simply go through, carving (cut) the snare out to a new track…cut the bassdrums out to their own new track…same with each of the 3 occasional toms…most hihats…some crash cymbals…some of the ride cymbals.
I currently have the mono drumkit carved into 11-12 individual mono tracks of drums that way.
I then go back to say, the hihat track…which has various holes where I did the cuts…copy in other areas of intact hihat…nudging for timing etc (I’m working off a tempo map that follows the original 1966 band recording which was not to a click).
Same with say, snare. Some of the individual isolated snares I pull sound really good by themselves…in a 1966 context. Same with other drum pieces.
At any rate, this all works fine in the context of the remix rebuild of the overall multitrack.
But I’m wondering if I can …in Spectralayers with the original mono drumkit again loaded…grab…say…one of the good snare hits that I previously extracted…and somehow have Spectralayers look at that snare hit…and then pull ALL of those out of the mixed mono kit…and maybe even all the snares from that sonic zipcode of the snare hit that came from the file…to save time.
My intuition says no…after all…that’s probably a machine-learn function.
I admit there are things I never use in Spectralayers…maybe some of the “casting” features or whatever…are in the ballpark of approaches to try.
The way I do it now certainly works but is soooo time consuming.
By the way, I also add secondary drum hits to bolster parts where I feel it’s helpful…things I pull from the same drummer kit …but that’s all done back in Nuendo once I have the 11-12 drum kit pieces split out.
For example, if a particular snare hit is anemic…not from the drummer’s playing but rather as an artifact from the overall song demix where demucs or whatever didn’t quite catch that snare hit adequately because a B3 organ chord interferred…or whatever…I’ll copy one of the good-sounding snare hits to replace that spot.
I can of course, go further with separate tracks …bolstering with complete drum replacement…which is pretty easy once I have isolated drum tracks…but I’m trying to keep these projects relatively true to the 1966 playing.
Perhaps there is no shortcut for the way I do it now.
