Suggestions for Using Spleeter

A couple of days ago, while working on the George Harrison album "All Things Must Pass - Acoustic," I stumbled across a truly great free sound editing program called Spleeter. I've been editing audio for a few years now, and I'd always understood that there were severe limits over what one could do. Basically, once all the different tracks (or channels, if you want to call them that) of a song were mixed together into stereo or mono, one couldn't undo them, just like one couldn't unbake a cake. Either one had to have access to the original multitracks, which was rare, or one had to go to great expense using fancy technology to separate the tracks out. The people in control of the Beatles' music did this to about 70 of their songs so they could be used for the video game Rock Band, but that was said to be very difficult and cost millions of dollars.

But hey, technology keeps improving! It turns out Spleeter first appeared in late 2019, and has been getting better since, so this is fairly new stuff. Here's how the program works: you drag and drop a song file into a certain area of the program page, then it splits it into as many as five different tracks. If you choose the five track option, you get tracks for 1) vocals, 2) bass, 3) drums, 4) piano, and 5) other. The program has its limitations - I'm especially frustrated that guitars aren't their own separate track, and get lumped in with whatever other instruments happened to be there that don't fit the first four categories. Plus, sometimes there's some sound quality loss and/or things sound a bit off. But still, compared to the crude methods available before, this program seems to be a game changer!

So here's what this post is about. I think I'll be able to do lots of interesting things with this program that I can post on this blog, but I've just begun to think about the possibilities. I'd like to hear if you have any suggestions on music that can be improved using this technology. Here are some options.

1) Sometimes songs or even whole albums are mixed badly. Consider "Watch That Man" by David Bowie. The vocals are mixed inexplicably low. I just used Spleeter to boost the vocals but keep everything else the same, and it sounds much better, in my opinion. So I'd like to hear of other songs that are in need of obvious fixing. Perhaps even other people can try using Spleeter and post their changes here. But again, be mindful of the program's limitations. For instance, you can't separate out the lead vocals from the backing vocals (unless they don't overlap).

2) For the George Harrison album "All Things Must Pass - Acoustic," I was able to take some demos with loud bass and drums on them and strip them down to just the vocals and guitar. I think it worked quite well. (Check out my posting of the album from a couple of days ago to judge for yourself.) It's possible other songs or even entire albums could be edited to create acoustic versions. In some cases, I don't think it would work that well. For instance, I was thinking it would be interesting to cut down the production of ELO (Electric Light Orchestra) albums, but the guitars and orchestra are lumped together on that "other" track. However, in other cases it might work very well. The fact that there's a separate track just for piano (by the way, it seems to only be piano and not keyboards or synths), could make it possible to create solo acoustic versions of some Elton John albums, I'd think.

3) A commenter at this blog already noted that the program could be used to improve interesting bootlegs that unfortunately are mixed badly. For instance, imagine a bootleg that sounds great, but the vocals are too low. Spleeter might or might not be able to fix that, depending on just how low the vocals are, but it could help in some cases. So I'd be interested to hear of bootlegs that might be improved.

4) A special category in my mind are 1980s albums that suffer from overproduction. In my opinion, many musicians who were big in the 1960s and 1970s went astray trying to keep up with the trending sounds of the 1980s. Typically, there was too much synth, and the drums were way too loud. I'm not sure how much Spleeter could help with the synths, since those are lumped in the "other" track, but it certainly could help with the drums. In fact, as an experiment, today I used Spleeter to completely remove the drums and bass from one of Joni Mitchell's 1980s albums, "Wild Things Run Fast." It sounds VERY different. It's an improvement, at least in my opinion, sounding much more like her beloved albums from the 1960s and early 1970s.

Those are just some ideas off the top of my head. Perhaps you could think of others? This program can be misused in ways that may upset the musicians involved. But I think it could be used in positive ways, if used wisely.

Here's one example. This zip file contains two versions of David Bowie's song "Watch That Man," from his 1973 album "Aladdin Sane." They're identical, except I boosted the vocals in the one with "Volume Edit" in the title. I didn't change it a lot, but enough so you can actually hear what he's saying most of the time.

https://www99.zippyshare.com/v/S0txCeYi/file.html

Here's another example that I've edited to make the differences more noticeable. This is of the song "Carouselamba" from the 1979 Led Zeppelin album "In through the Out Door." Supposedly, guitarist Jimmy Page thought that singer Robert Plant wrote lyrics to the song that were critical of him, so he mixed them way down. This zip has that version, plus the Spleeter volume adjusted version. I still can't tell what Plant is singing much of the time, but at least his voice stands out now.

https://www120.zippyshare.com/v/WVynMtpj/file.html

Anyway, suggestions on what to do - or not to do - with this program are welcome! (Also note that it seems Spleeter accepts most any music file, so a high quality .flac file will have better sound results than an .mp3.)

By the way, here's the version of Joni Mitchell's "Wild Things Must Fast" album without drums or bass, as mentioned above. This was a crude experiment just to see what one could do. Perhaps a more clever edit would be to reduce the drums and bass on a case by case basis rather than removing them completely. But this can give you an idea of Spleeter's capabilities.

https://www40.zippyshare.com/v/m7zoAUzM/file.html