Removing a drum track from a song

A friend has asked me to remove the drum tracks from a couple of tracks (for his daughter to drum along too).

Can this be done using GarageBand (Mac) or do I need to download a piece of software?

Im getting conflicting reports via google whether GarageBand can be used to do this, from having a little play around with it, I don’t think it can.

If anyone can give any advice on how to remove a drum track it’d be greatly appreciated.

Forget it.

Best thing to do would be to find a MIDI file of the song and edit it.

EDIT. Wasn’t sure what Garageband was, just checked and yes, you’ll be able to use it to do what you need by using a MIDI file. It won’t sound much like the actual song though due to how MIDI works, and it won’t have vocals, unless you find an Acapella…

It really boils down to how good you are with music production software.

Pretty much what jambourgue said.

The only way to have a go is by Eq-ing the drum frequencies out. But as the can overlap with other instruments/vocals you’ll end up with a weird sounding track. You can always try though using audacity (free).

Rather out of my depth here, but I suspect it’s either not easy, or not possible, because you need to be able to separate the individual audio channels, and I don’t think GarageBand is sophisticated enough to do this from a two-channel stereo track.
I guess you’d need ProTools, or something like that. There’s a programme called WavePad Sound Editor that might do what you want, but it’s around $50, used to be $129.
Stet, appears to be a free download, there’s one in the AppStore as well.
http://wavepad.en.softonic.com

The hippity hoppers used to eq tracks to isolate bass and drums, not completely impossible but as said before, it’s not going to sound like a track that’s just missing the drums

Are the drums miked? You could record the drums while listening to the track then see how they match up when both tracks are played back? I tend to do this sort of thing when playing along on guitar

Never looked, but have a hunt around for websites where songs have been stripped back to single tracks, someone out there must have tried it

Audacity has a noise removal feature which works by you sampling the offending noise – in this case the drums – then removing any matching frequencies in the whole track. There’s going to be some collateral damage though no doubt.

What’s the song?

Big songs you can get pretty realistic tabs for using guitar pro. Then you can turn off the tracks required and play along. Removing drums via EQ is not that easy.

Thanks all for the advice so far.

The songs (!) are:

Sugar by Marion 5 (clean version)
Seasons by only Murs
Hold back the river by James bay.

moron 5 (with click)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3OXpAxdQqU

james blay acoustic

cant find the murs

From experience I find it easier to drum along to a song with the drums still there.

Hope this helps

i don’t play the drums but i’ve recorded some bands and play guitar a bit.

it must be bloody difficult to “play along” to the band who have already recorded with a rythm track.

From experience I find it easier to drum along to a song with the drums still there.

Hope this helps

^this. Definitely. As a learning drummer, I really enjoy playing along to full band tracks, and I don’t consciously hear the recorded drums. And yet, if the drum track’s not there it’s tough to play. The band follows the drummer, so you can’t remove the drummer they followed and try, as a drummer, to follow the rest of the band.
I suggest you and your friend rethink, but I applaud your effort in supporting her.
If she’s had enough of playing along to other drummers, the only thing a drummer can do is get a bunch of musicians to stand round their kit so they can lead them.

Removing drums via EQ is not that easy.

Rather depends on the song to be honest, but as a general rule you are correct.

Audacity has a noise removal feature which works by you sampling the offending noise – in this case the drums – then removing any matching frequencies in the whole track. There’s going to be some collateral damage though no doubt.

There’s always going to be a bit of collateral damage, it just depends how important or not that is to the individual.

FWIW, my approach to doing this correctly would be to load up the song you want to remove the drums from in Logic, find a part of the song where there is a drum loop playing solo (or as close to solo as possible), and copy the loop into another track. Then start experimenting with various plugins in logic to isolate said frequencies, and see if you can remove them, before then applying these parameters onto the whole song.

Or… If you know that the song has synthesised drums (therefore always perfectly keep time), create a loop of the drums then create it’s inverse waveform on another track. Then play the two together and you should have total silence as the waveforms cancel each other out!

You would then just play the entire original track with the inverse waveform loop over the top of it, and hey presto, all you should hear is everything except the drums! 😀

Mboy – that’s what the noise thing on audacity does

Which ever way you choose to go be sure it isn’t downloading anything from Softonic, as suggested by CountZero.

Drumming along without at least a click track will be depressingly difficult! Best to play along with them there, they seem to vanish if you’re fairly in time anyway.

The only way I know of properly getting rid of drums is using the multitrack master or finding a version on Rock Band without them.

Get her some Motown to play along with instead!