How to extract drums from a song
Getting the drums out of a finished, mixed song used to mean EQ tricks and phase cancellation. Today it's a two-step job for machine-learning models, and you can get separate kick, snare and cymbal stems in a couple of minutes.
Why it takes two steps
General stem splitters are trained to separate four or six broad instruments: vocals, bass, drums, and "other" (some models add guitar and piano). They give you one drum stem with the whole kit summed together.
To get individual pieces, a second model that was trained only on drum kits listens to that drum stem and pulls it apart into kick, snare, toms, hi-hat, ride and crash. Running the drum-only model on the full mix works worse, because it was never trained to ignore bass, vocals and synths.
DrumSplit runs both steps for you: Demucs first, then MDX23C DrumSep on the drum stem it produces.
Step by step
- Start from the best file you have. A wav or flac gives noticeably cleaner splits than a 128 kbps mp3. Compression smears transients and throws away high-frequency detail, and the hats and cymbals suffer most.
- Upload it on the home page. Songs up to 8 minutes work.
- Listen in the mixer before downloading. Solo each piece. You'll quickly hear which pieces came out clean and which have bleed.
- Download what you need. Grab single pieces as WAV, the kit as a zip, or every stem including bass, vocals and the rest of the mix.
- Line them up in your DAW. Every stem starts at the same point as the original song, so dropping them all at bar 1 keeps them in sync. Set your project tempo to the song's BPM (shown after the split) to get a grid to edit against.
What you can do with the pieces
- Study a groove. Solo the hi-hat to hear exactly where the swing and the accents are, then program it yourself.
- Sample one hit. Find a spot where the snare plays alone, cut it out, and you have a one-shot with the original room and processing.
- Remix or rebalance. Turn the kick up or the cymbals down in a song you're practicing along to.
- Replace the drums. Convert the kick and snare stems to MIDI and trigger your own samples. Here's how.
Know the limits
Separation is a best guess, not a recovery of the original multitrack. Hi-hat and cymbals can trade energy, heavily distorted or side-chained mixes are harder, and reverb tails get split between pieces. This guide covers the usual problems and how to clean them up.
Finally, only upload music you have the right to use, and check the license before releasing anything built from someone else's recording.