I am restoring some forty year old audio multi-tracks. The drums were recorded from a drum machine to a single track. Is there a way to separate out the elements (kick, snare, cowbell, hi-hat, toms etc.) – maybe a plug-in or some other software could do this…?
Any advice much appreciated.
While Spectralayers Pro can separate mixed tracks in general…if you already have a singular mixed mono/stereo track of say, Linndrum etc, you might want to experiment with the standalone “Rebeat” program by the drumagog guys.
That one is designed to grab & demix snares, bd, toms, rides, crash etc into separate stems in one pass.
I haven’t tried it myself yet, but plan to. I own Spectralayers Pro.
Fuse also makes something specialized to spit out individual drums from mixed drums. Haven’t tried that one yet either.
The drumagog (wavemachine labs) guys say that Rebeat is trained from extensive models (they do a lot of MIT name dropping 
)but they’re close-lipped on if they mean demucs etc.
Many thanks DosWasBest for prompt response.
I’ll look into those. Are they both standalone or can they ge used as plug-ins? I’m slightly concerned about timing going awry putting them back with the rest of the tracks after.
It is only really a cowbell thst is too loud; the rest is OK or adjustable with EQ - I just can’t shift the cowbell with EQ.
To be honest I haven’t even tried spectralayers yet; maybe one of the modules can dig out that cowbell and that would be enough for my purposes.
Thanks again for your advice - much food for thought…I’ll post how this goes.
Hi DosWasBest
Thanks again for the tips.
I went for DrumsSSX from Fuse Audio Labs. It separates a drum track quite well with a little experimentation and some audio editing after.
Yana Mahal demos it well at the link.
SL and RX are obviously great but way more spec than needed for just breaking down a drum track.
ssx looks interesting but (and I may be wrong), it appears that the plug operates in realtime but with no on-the-fly export of each drum to a new individual file once learned from the mix.
I’d want to be able to selectively/export place each drum on a new track once isolated from the combined drums…not keep dealing with the plugin running.
Perhaps there is an export feature on the plugin that I don’t see. Or, I guess at least, I could solo the overall Cubendo track with say bd solo’d within the plug (and the plug yet further soloing say, bd)…and export the overall track that way and then re-import it to a new project track.
Which would seem a bit more cumbersome.
SSX is not ideal and there may be something better out there but I am only doing a one-off job restoring some old audio.
It exports a set-up which is a waste of time but you can imprint individual SSX channels as separate audio tracks.
As I say it’s a bit hit and miss but you can usually get something useable and audio edit in the DAW after.
A really skilled user of SL or RX could possibly do a better job but they seem more geared for sophisticated audio sculpting and design or breaking down stereo mixes into stems neither of which I need.