secret code access that came along with The Real Book, the Aebersold series was all above board and most music stores at the time had a selection of them available in the sheet music rack for easy purchase. If you wanted to get a chance to solo over blues in Bb with a swing beat at 120 bpm or a Bossa Nova backing of‘ Blue Bossa’, Aebersold had you covered.
Jump forward about 30 or so years and it is easy enough to just search YouTube for these sorts of play-along tracks for musicians. But what about audio engineers? Well, it is now easy enough to record the praise band playing their Sunday service into the console and playing it back via Dante to practice your mix via what is usually referred to as‘ Dante Virtual Sound Check’. In a manner similar to junior high school Jeff learning to play jazz without needing to call together the band, your audio team can practice mixing on a Tuesday night using the very tracks that the worship team recorded during their rehearsal. How does adding a new compressor to the bass work out? Is there a better approach to the overhead drum mics
EQ? Dante Virtual Sound Check allows for sorting this out in an empty venue without the band needing to be there. How about when we don’ t have access to the band to record or we might not be able to get into the venue?
Of course, there is now a way to use AI to help out. Assuming MultiTracks. com or other sorts of resources aren’ t available for a particular song( or perhaps budget restraints make this an issue), it is now rather simple to start with any finished production audio track and have AI work its magic to break the tracks back apart à la an Aebersold record. The same sorts of experimenting with individual track EQ and effects that are available via Dante Virtual Sound Check are now at your fingertips within a DAW like Logic Pro. As an added bonus, just about any audio track is in scope. MultiTracks. com is awesome and is still my preferred method for teaching and learning( definitely go check it out!), but the AI generated audio stems trick allows for a wider array of very basic audio content for educational purposes and it is free( assuming you already have Logic Pro, etc.).
I won’ t get into the step-by-step of how to achieve this in Logic Pro, simply head over to the“ Extract vocal and instrumental stems with Stem Splitter in Logic Pro for Mac.” support page and follow the instructions. Of course, there are a few different platforms and tools that can output a similar sort of stem track set. I just happen to be most familiar with Logic Pro. Oh, and note that Stem Splitter is only available on Macs with an M1 or later Apple silicon processor due to the sort of AI processing it requires.
For this exercise I chose a favorite George Jones track as an example:‘ Amazing Grace’ from‘ The Gospel Collection: George Jones Sings the Greatest Stories Ever Told’( 2003). Again, this trick seems to work well for just about everything I’ ve thrown into it so far in the usual worship band sort of guitar, vocals, drums, keys sort of instrumentation range. In this case, I started out with a stereo mp3 of the song:( Fig. 1)
Following along on the Stem Splitter instructions, I ended up with this result:( Fig. 2)
( Fig. 1)
( Fig. 2)
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