There is always a wall somewhere when your band is learning a song. The bass especially — it sits so low that you cannot tell what is being played at all.
The drum fills go past in a flash and you have no idea how they were played. You rewind again and again, listening as hard as you can, and it all just turns to mush. If you play in a band, you have almost certainly been here at least once.
Lately, though, AI has come far enough that stem separation — pulling a single instrument out of a finished song — is something anyone can do in a browser. It is a genuinely good time to be learning parts.
So here are three ways to put stem separation to work when you are learning a part, and make the whole job a lot less painful.
1. Bring a buried bass line to the surface
First: getting the bass line, which always seems to hide, to stand out clearly. Bass holds up the whole song and matters enormously, but it is easily swamped by the thud of the kick drum and by anything the guitars are doing down low.
This is where stem separation earns its keep. It gives you a bass-only track in a couple of clicks. Everything else disappears and the bass comes through clean — the nuance of the picking hand, slides that were never in any transcription, even the faint ghost notes. All of it, first time through.
2. Work out the fills and the ghost notes
Second: getting to the bottom of drum fills and snare ghost notes. The hardest part of learning drums by ear is exactly that — the fast fill that is over before you register it, the quiet ghost notes on the snare, the precise moment the hi-hat opens and closes.
Pull out the drums on their own, put them on repeat, and which cymbal that was, and which tom the hand landed on, becomes startlingly obvious.
3. Tell two guitars — and the keys — apart
Third: separating out twin guitar parts, or the keyboard quietly holding things together behind everything else. In a band with two guitarists, or a song with keys sitting nicely underneath, it is easy to lose track of which guitar is playing which line, or what the keyboard part actually is.
Pull out "other", or the guitar track on its own, and things normally hidden behind the vocal come out sharply: the chord voicings, the little panned obbligati — the decorative phrases tucked between the lines of the melody. "Wait, that was in there the whole time?" That sense of discovery is one of the real pleasures of stem separation.
Put the tracks on your phone and take them with you
Once you have the tracks, put them on your phone. Learning the part gets quicker, obviously — but simply listening to your own part on the way to work or school is remarkably effective on its own. Your part and the shape of the whole song start to line up in your head. By the time you are in a rehearsal room together, the playing is noticeably different.
One last thing
If you would rather not sink hours into learning parts by ear, or you want to play something closer to the record, it is worth trying a free browser-based stem separator once. All that struggling may turn out to have been unnecessary.
The stem separation in this article runs free in your browser — no sign-up, and your audio never leaves your device.