Guitar karaoke: the real record with the guitar taken out
Guitar karaoke means playing along with the original recording after its guitar part has been removed, so your guitar takes its place. That is what Guitaroke does, and this is why I am building it.
Singers have had karaoke for about fifty years. The idea is simple: take the lead voice out, leave the band, hand someone a microphone. Guitar players never got the same deal. We got backing tracks, which are a different thing. A backing track is somebody's re-recording of the song, in a tempo that is almost right, with a drummer who is not the drummer you grew up listening to.
What I wanted was the actual record with one hole in it, shaped like the guitar.
Why is muting the guitar not enough?
Earlier I made Stem Player, a site that splits a song into separate instruments. You can mute the guitar there. But muting is where that tool stops, and for a guitarist it is where the work begins.
Playing along with a record through a practice amp in the room never sits right. Your guitar is either buried or twice as loud as the band. The tone is whatever you had dialled in for the last song. And when you get to the bar you cannot play, you reach for the mouse, drag the playhead back, and miss the entrance again.
None of that is hard to fix. It is just that nobody had put the pieces in one place.
What does a guitar play-along tool need?
Four things, as far as I can tell:
- The record without its guitar.
- An amp tone in the neighbourhood of the one on the record.
- Your volume sitting where the original guitar sat.
- A way to repeat a few bars, slowly if needed.
Guitaroke is those four pieces. The song gets split in the browser. Your guitar comes in through your audio interface and goes through an amp and a few pedals. The part I like most is small: before it throws the original guitar away, the program measures it. How loud it sits in the mix, how bright it is, how much gain, whether there is an echo and how long. Then it sets your amp and your level from that. It is an approximation and I say so in the interface, but it means you press play and you are already in the right room.
The rest is what any practice tool needs. A loop between two points. Tempo you can slow down without the pitch dropping. A tuner.
Why does it run in a browser?
Because the best practice tool is the one that is already open. No installer, no license manager, no plug-in host. I expected the browser to be the weak point, mostly because of latency, so I measured it before going further.
The other reason is cost. On Stem Player every split runs on a rented graphics card and I pay for each one. In Guitaroke the split runs on your own machine. That is the only way I can see to let people use a tool like this without a meter running.
Can I try it?
Yes. Guitaroke is open, it is free, and there is no account to make. It has only been tested on a handful of setups so far, so if it misbehaves on yours, the contact page has my address and I would like to hear about it.