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Looper's Delight
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One thing that sort of works would be to send the signal through two graphic equalizers. The first EQ would attempt to remove the unwanted parts, and the second one would try to smooth out the remaining sound. The reason I say it "sort of" works is because the signal you'll end up with most likely won't sound very much like the parts you liked on the record, but in many cases you can process it into something decent-sounding. Different, but decent-sounding. Creative use of compression and gating can also help pull a buried part more to the front. But unless you have access to the original multitrack masters (assuming the instruments had some separation to begin with), you're not going to have much luck removing certain instruments from a mix, particularly those with a "wide" signal (i.e. encompassing a large frequency range) like most percussion, guitar and synth parts. It would depend entirely on the way the instruments are distributed along the frequency spectrum on the particular record you're re-mixing; some producers strive for the clarity you get by keeping everyone in their own range as much as possible (remember when Fripp told Bruford not to use any cymbals?), while others like a "wall of sound" approach. I've found that the technique I've described above can work quite well when pulling a voice sample off of a videotape (what's left still sounds like speech, and you can flange it or something), but when applied to an instrumental passage it WILL change the tone of the part you're trying to isolate. Like Matt said, look for a part where the unwanted instrument is taking a breather, then loop a bar of the featured instrument if possible. Does anyone remember the Thompson Vocal Eliminator (TVE) that used to be advertised in the back of magazines? It claimed to be able to "remove the vocal track from any recording", so you could sing along. They showed a dude with a '70's moustache cutting a demo without having to pay any backing musicians. Those ads always cracked me up... Tim At 01:08 PM 6/24/00 PDT, you wrote: >>...I'd like to know if it's >>possible to completely cut out certain instruments out of a mix when >>sampling off of a record. Would I need a good mixer, or filters, eq, or >>somethig else? I tried the Electrix EQ- killer, and it didn't do the >>job. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!