Guitar Remover: Play Your Part with the Real Band

How to remove the guitar from a song

1. Drop the song onto the page. It runs in your browser, and your song isn't uploaded.
2. Preview six seconds where the guitar is exposed, such as an intro riff or a breakdown, to check the split. Then separate the full song.
3. The page starts with the guitar stem muted, and with Other muted too. Vocals, drums, bass, and piano keep playing. On six stems, raise Other if you still want strings and synths; the guitar stays down.
4. Plug in, loop the section you're working on, and export the guitar-free mix as WAV or MP3 if you want to keep it.

What you hear with the guitar muted

In the default six-stem split, guitar has its own fader, and this page pulls it down. Other starts down as well. Piano stays up. Organ, strings, and most synths live in Other, so they start quiet. Raise Other when you want them, and the guitar fader can stay down.

A song that's mostly guitar and voice comes out bare, but it's still a useful backing if you're learning to accompany a singer.

If you switch the player to four stems, there's no separate guitar fader. Guitar and keys share Other, and this page already has Other muted, so the guitar stays out.

Learn it first: solo the guitar

Before you play over the band, solo the guitar stem and loop a bar. Out of the mix you can hear things the full record hides: whether the chord is an open voicing or a barre, whether the strumming hand is hitting all six strings or just the top three, where the palm mute starts. Slow the loop a few steps if a riff is fast. The pitch doesn't move, so the notes you work out are the ones on the record.

Then unmute the band, mute the guitar again, and play what you learned against the real drummer.

Ways to practice with a guitar backing track

If you also want the singer out of the way, the vocal remover starts from the opposite mute. Muting guitar and vocals together leaves drums, bass, and piano, which is a thin but very clear backing for hearing your own playing. Need more than one part out? The backing track maker starts from a full split and lets you mute any mix. Piano on its own starts muted when you remove the piano from a song.

• Rhythm parts: loop the verse and lock your strumming to the hi-hat. If you rush, the vocal will tell you, because it no longer lines up with your chord changes.
• Solos: loop the solo section with the original guitar muted and improvise over the actual changes.
• Fills and answers: in a lot of songs the guitar answers the vocal between lines. With the guitar gone, those gaps are yours to fill.
• Speed: start slow, and let the speed trainer raise the tempo after a few clean loops. Stop when you are back at the record. The control can keep going past that, up to one and a half times.

Why some guitar stays in the mix

Guitar is harder to separate than vocals, drums, or bass, and some recordings make it harder still.

• Distortion spreads a guitar across the same range as cymbals, vocal consonants, and keyboards. Muting the guitar stem takes the body of the chord out, but a fizz can stay behind in other stems.
• Two guitars share one stem. Rhythm and lead, or double-tracked parts panned left and right, all land in the guitar stem together, so you can't mute the rhythm part and keep the solo.
• Acoustic guitar in a big room leaves its room sound behind, much like a vocal reverb tail.
• A clean single-note line in a sparse mix is the case that disappears most completely.

Tuning, capo, and key

Plenty of records aren't in standard tuning. If a band tuned down a half step and you don't want to retune, raise the record by one semitone, and it'll line up with a guitar in standard tuning. If the original was played with a capo on the second fret and you'd rather play open shapes, lower the record two semitones. Speed doesn't change either way. The pitch control stops at twelve semitones either way. Not sure what key the song is in? The BPM and key finder gives you a starting point.