Isolate the instruments in a song
Split a track into its parts — and understand what can be separated and what genuinely cannot.
Drop your song here
or click to choose · mp3, wav, flac, m4a · up to 50 MB
What do you want?
This is the page where it is worth being straight with you, because it is the search where the gap between what people hope for and what the technology does is widest.
Separation splits a song into four musical roles: vocals, drums, bass, and everything else. That last category is real and useful, but it is a single file. Guitars, piano, keys, strings, horns and synths all arrive inside it, together.
Why guitar and piano are not separate files
The models that do this work were trained on datasets where songs came with four separated tracks: vocals, drums, bass and a fourth catch-all. That four-way structure is baked into what the model learned, so it can only produce what it was taught to recognise.
There is a genuine technical reason it stops there, not just a data one. Drums are percussive, bass is low, and voices are voices — each has a distinctive signature. A rhythm guitar and an electric piano playing the same chord voicing in the same octave are far harder to tell apart, even for a person listening carefully, because they overlap almost completely in pitch and time.
Six-stem models that attempt guitar and piano separately do exist in research and in some desktop tools. They are noticeably less reliable than the four-way split, and adding one here is on the list rather than in the product.
What you actually get
Choosing Everything runs the four-part model and builds all eight files from it.
- Vocals — all singing, lead and backing together
- Drums — the full kit as one stem
- Bass — the bassline, played or programmed
- Other — guitars, keys, synths, strings, horns — everything that is not one of the above
- The four minus-one mixes — the song with each of those parts removed in turn
Working around the four-way limit
- If one instrument dominates the 'other' stem in a given section, that section may be usable in isolation even though the whole file is not.
- The minus-one files are often more useful than the isolated ones for this purpose — 'song without the rest' leaves you voice, drums and bass, which is a clean rhythm section.
- For a part that only appears in one section, separate the whole song and then cut to the section; the model does better with musical context than with a short clip.
- Where a guitar sits alone in an intro, the 'other' stem is effectively an isolated guitar for those bars. Arrangement does more for you here than any setting.
Questions
›Can I get just the guitar?
Not as its own file. Guitar arrives inside the 'other' stem along with keys and any other harmonic instruments. If the guitar is the only such instrument playing in a passage, that passage of the stem is effectively the guitar alone.
›Can I get just the piano?
Same answer, and for the same reason. Piano is part of 'other'. A solo piano intro will come through cleanly; a piano under a full band will not be separable from it.
›Will you add a six-stem model?
Possibly. A six-source variant exists that attempts guitar and piano as their own stems, but its accuracy on those two is well below what the four-way split achieves on drums or bass, so it would have to sit alongside the current option rather than replace it.
›Why does 'other' sometimes contain vocal reverb?
Because reverb tails are ambiguous. A long reverb on a voice is acoustically closer to a sustained pad than to singing, so parts of it end up in 'other' rather than in the vocal stem.
Where it struggles
The honest headline is the one above: four roles, not one file per instrument. Beyond that, the 'other' stem is the messiest of the four by construction, because it is defined as whatever was left over — expect it to carry reverb tails, incidental noise and anything the model was unsure about.