Let’s address the elephant in the room: separating stems is obnoxious to deal with.

Sometimes, when I hear a really good song and my creative juices start flowing, I want to remix it. If a track has a really good topline, for example, then I want to take that topline and play with it.

The only issue? Nine out of ten times, I can’t get that topline. I have to do ridiculous amounts of EQ to isolate it from the rest of the track, or worse, use one of those low-effort online stem separators to eventually get a poor quality vocal given back to me.

So, when I heard that Acon Digital had a real-time stem separator, I was intrigued. Not only does it operate locally within your DAW, but being able to separate specific parts of an audio file in real time is something that I have not seen before.

That real-time stem separator is called Remix, and as the name implies, it’s going to change the remix and bootleg game forever by just how easy it makes the stem separation process. Let’s take a look.

A Simple Interface for a Complex Plugin

That’s right: the world’s first real-time stem splitter only needs five sliders. The plugin splits the audio into five ranges: vocals, piano, bass, drums, and “other,” which is basically any sound that doesn’t fit into those first four categories. Then, all you have to do to emphasize a certain stem is bring the slider up. All you have to do to minimize a stem is bring the slider down. Consider it a volume slider for entire frequency ranges.

The “S” under each slider stands for solo, and the “M” stands for mute. These work as you’d expect: hit “solo” and you’ll only hear the vocals or piano. Hit mute and you won’t hear that part of the file at all.

The sensitivity knobs determine just how hard the plugin will work to split the frequency range. Turn it all the way down and it’ll let everything through. Keep turning it up, and the response curve will get sharper and sharper until you hear only what you want to hear. These are admittedly a little finicky and the perfect amount of sensitivity will vary track by track, so you’ll have to play around; especially if the raw audio is dynamic in nature.

That’s it. There are a few presets to help you get easy starting points for separating drums, vocals, piano, and so forth, but absolutely nothing else is hiding. What you see is what you get, and it really doesn’t need to do more.

So, how well does it work?

Results

An instance of Remix with the vocals soloed. I can only hear vocals here.

I think the first thing to understand is that the only way you can access full-quality stems if you have them. No stem splitter will ever, ever reach that level of quality.

So, with that caveat out of the way, Remix does its job well. Success will vary on a few different aspects of the original track, including mix quality and, as previously mentioned, how dynamic the original track is. If your original track has wild volume changes every fifteen seconds, Remix probably won’t be able to account for all of that. But, if things stay at a similar amplitude level for the entire song, then you’ll probably be fine.

The two things that Remix does the best is separating vocals and drums. And, often, when I want to do a spur-of-the-moment remix, vocals are what I need the most. So I’m glad to see that I found the most success in separating those. When it comes to drums, Remix is going to make re-sampling a lot easier. You’ll be able to separate the drum track, take a sample from that drum track, and then process it further to create a new drum to use in your own tracks. Of course, that sample may not be cleared, so I’d use that technique with caution, but it’s definitely a fun use for this plugin.

I’ll demonstrate how this plugin works using one of my latest releases – The Way We Get It. In this demo, you’ll hear that I’ve applied Remix at every two bar interval to separate a different part of the track: first the vocals, then the bass, then the drums, then the piano range. I think that the plugin had the most success with the vocals here, but every track is different, so another of my songs might provide better results when it comes to the bass or piano regions.

Pros and Cons:

Pros:

Stem separation has never been simpler.

The main point of this plugin is to serve as a simple stem separator. It’s safe to say that Remix does that, and does it well. Plus, having it as a local plugin that can play in real time is incredible, too. That is definitely a feat of machine learning in itself.

It’s so easy to use and fairly easy to fine-tune.

Having such a complex machine learning algorithm controllable by only five sliders and knobs is seriously impressive, and it’s so easy to play with. Plus, because it’s a real time plugin, you can make changes to the sensitivity knob while listening to truly determine if what you’re doing is working.

It’s decently priced.

For what you get with this plugin, $50 USD is reasonable. But, they offer a free trial if you want some time to make up your mind.

Cons:

It’s hard on the CPU.

I encountered a few system overloads during my test run. Definitely be ready to freeze any tracks you use this on, as you would with any machine learning plugin.

A dynamic mode would be nice.

As I mentioned earlier, it would be cool if the plugin sensed drastic changes in the original audio and made the requisite sensitivity changes to account for them. But, I can only imagine how hard that would be to accomplish, so I’m definitely not upset that it’s not here. Just be prepared to work a little harder if your track drastically changes its amplitude a lot.

It’s definitely not for you if you don’t do a lot of sampling and remixing.

The target audience of this plugin is clearly those who love to sample and remix existing tracks, as that’s basically what it allows you to do. If you aren’t a big sampler or remixer, this isn’t the plugin for you. If you are? You’ll absolutely love it.

Conclusion: Should you get it?

It really depends just how much you need to split stems in your daily life. If stem splitting isn’t a common part of your production routine, then I wouldn’t get it. But, if it is, then this might be the most useful plugin you ever pick up. Either way, it’s an impressive showing from Acon Digital, and they’re definitely a name to keep an eye on in the machine learning space.

Buy Remix here.

The post Acon Digital Remix Review: Is This Real-Time Stem Separator Effective? appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.