Drum Remover: Make a Drumless Track to Play Along With

How to make a drumless track

1. Drop the song onto the page. It runs in your browser, and your song isn't uploaded.
2. Preview six seconds with a clear snare to check that the kit lands in the drum stem, then separate the full song.
3. The Drummer preset mutes the drum stem. Vocals, bass, guitar, piano, and other stay up.
4. Set a loop, turn on the count-in, and play. Export the drumless mix as WAV or MP3 if you want it on another device.

What stays in the track

Everything except the kit: the vocal, the bass, guitars, keys, and the Other stem. That's the important part for a drummer. You're not playing to a click and a chord chart; you're playing to the bass player you're supposed to lock with and the singer whose phrases your fills set up.

Cymbal wash is the usual leftover. A ride or a crash is long and bright, and part of it can be filed in Other. If a ride pattern still shimmers after the mute, lower Other a little on that loop. It also lowers guitars and keys, so do it only where it bothers you. Shakers, tambourines, and hand claps can end up on either side, depending on the mix.

Learn the part from the drum stem

Before muting the kit, solo it. With the band gone you can hear the hi-hat pattern, the ghost notes on the snare, and exactly where the kick sits against the bass. Loop one bar and slow it until you can count every hit. That's the fastest way to transcribe a fill, or to settle an argument about whether the chorus goes to the ride.

A middle step works well too: don't mute the drums, pull the drum fader halfway down. The original drummer becomes a quiet guide you can lean on while you learn the groove. Then drop it all the way out.

Practice routines with a drumless track

To work on the bass and drums relationship from the other side, the bass remover keeps the kit and takes out the bass line. Need more than one part out? The backing track maker mutes the kit and anything else the band is covering. The piano has its own start-muted page: remove the piano from a song.

• Groove first: loop the verse at a speed you can play cleanly. Let the speed trainer step the tempo up after a few clean passes. Stop at the record if that is the tempo you want. The control can go as fast as one and a half times.
• Fills in context: set A and B around the bar before the fill and the bar after it. Practicing the landing matters as much as the fill itself.
• Sections: drop markers on the verse, chorus, and bridge so you can jump between feels without scrubbing through the song.
• Dynamics: play a whole song through without looping. Check whether your chorus actually lifts and whether the verse leaves room for the vocal.

Click, count-in, and tempo

The metronome and the count-in follow the song's estimated tempo. The count-in is four clicks. Most of the time that's what you want: once the drums are gone, the click stands in for the pulse. Two things to watch:

• Double or half time. A song you feel at 70 BPM may read as 140, because the estimate locked onto eighth-note hats. If the click is racing, count the snare you would actually play, not the number on the screen. The BPM and key finder explains why this happens.
• Live recordings drift. A band that speeds up into the chorus will pull away from a fixed click. For those songs, turn the click off and follow the band. That's the real skill anyway.

Programmed drums and live kits

Programmed drums usually separate cleanly: short hits, a small room, and nothing bleeding into other microphones. A live kit recorded in one room with the band is harder, because the overheads hear everything. Tuned 808s that play notes can split between drums and bass, so you may hear a bit of low end vanish with the kit. None of this stops you from practicing. You don't need a perfect subtraction to play along; you need the drums out of the way.

Comparing ways to remove drums? See 5 free methods compared.