I am interested in making some drum cover video like this one THE NEIGHBOURHOOD - PREY (DRUM COVER) - YouTube, but I can’t find any of the songs I want to play without the drum track. Is there a resource for this? Also the audio of the vocals seems very good, do they usually play the song again and add the audio of the drums to it, or is it done all at once?
I think the drums you hear in that video are the original drums on the song track, not the drums played by the drummer in the video. The drums sound perfectly mixed and professionally “processed” (compression, gating, reverb, etc) which to me means one of two things:
Either it’s the drums on the original music track, OR, someone got a hold of a perfect recording of that song without drum track and proceeded to expertly mic, record, process, and sweeten their own track which was played perfectly.
I think it’s the former.
That one is the drums on the recording, not being played.
Most people just mic their drums and mix them on top of the recording. If we can see you hitting the drum, it’s easy to sync up your actions with the sounds we hear so we know which is you and which is the recording.
Check out one of my favorite drum cover folks:
Taylor Gordon, the Pocket Queen doing Din Da Da
I can see the mics on her kit, I can see her striking the drums and I can hear the noises she makes as synced up by the visual and aural stimulus.
Are you sure? To me it sounds like the drums and in particular the cymbals are alot louder in that video than in the bands official recording here The Neighbourhood - Prey - YouTube. Is there a way to raise the drum volume if he was just playing the song and not including his own audio?
I think so. Maybe there’s a little of that guy’s drumming in the mix. Maybe his hi-hat is in there a bit but I don’t think it’s much because I think I’m hearing 80 to 100 percent of the recording. I wouldn’t bet my life on it.
Anyway, I think that’s how most people make drum cover vids. They play on top of the original recording and choose how much (if any) of their own drumming they include in the final mix.
I think the “official recording” you linked to is a different song. One’s called “Cry Baby” and the other is “Prey”.
I watch a lot of drum cover vids (for god knows what reason, as I’m not a drummer, but I just like drumming), and this is what is the case pretty much all the time.
It isn’t too hard to isolate sections of a song with a modern DAW.
A more extreme example where the vocals have been extracted.
[quote=“rat_avatar, post:7, topic:822293”]
It isn’t too hard to isolate sections of a song with a modern DAW.
A more extreme example where the vocals have been extracted.
[/QUOTE]There’s no way that’s extracted from a full mix. It’s not that easy to isolate tracks. There are some tricks involving how stereo tracks are panned and how vocals are usually dead center, so you can extract vocals out of it, but they’re not that clean. That is somebody who had access to the separated tracks. Was this track featured on any of the Rock Band or Guitar Hero games? If so, that’s likely where it came from.
It is hard work but not impossible and there are actually entire products to do this.
Audionamix’s ADX Trax Pro is one example, center parting isn’t the only option. I chose that example because speech is the hardest to do.
I don’t believe that track is isolated using software. Do you have any reason to believe it is? I’ve seen some of the demonstrations of the software, and it’s nothing like this. The Pixies link is, as I hear it, an isolated track from the original recording, not software processed.
It is similar, but remember that this is only one step. There is entire communities that do this.
If you listen to the pixies vocals you can hear some left over nasty reverb, but that is more work you need to do.
As for drums, outside of the snare they are a far easier problem to solve compared to voice. I don’t know the material in the OP well enough to know but this is just all fourier transforms and filters for drums. Sure it is not easy to do but but it is easy enough that there are several usable drum extracting VSTs out there.
Those VST’s aren’t needed if you have good filters but they save a lot of time. Anyone who has a reasonable amount of time in the modular synth world will have a reasonable head start on drums although the noise portions are more challenging in snares and HH.
I don’t want to advertise for these companies but this is just a sum of sine waves. But if you haven’t seen Jerobeam Fenderson’s videos he drew with sound on Oscilloscopes it may help visualize it…plus it’s awesome.
As for the original track, while youtube compression posses serious challenges to any objective answer the tails and timbre on the tambourine will show that it is not the same one.
There is some bleed through on sections with lots of noise. Without better source it is almost impossible to tell but I would guess the simple split into mono and invert on track would have been enough with the louder volume on the mix.
From digging around, it looks to me like it was actually on one of the Rock Band games and that there’s a torrent out there that has all the separations of the Pixies “Why.” I can’t find the torrent to compare, though. I suppose that doesn’t rule out software was being used to make the separations.
It also appears that “Why” was the only track on that album recorded totally live, together, with no overdubs, so perhaps that explains some of the instrument bleed in it.
Music Minus One has a catalog of their own recordings with various instruments dropped out, but they’re kind of an old outfit and lean towards jazz. I don’t know what’s in their catalog these days.
Hal Leonard also has a series called Drum Play-Along that might have some songs you want to try.
P.S. For some reason I can’t highlight text on the Dope anymore, so I can’t make that link look pretty. But there you have it.