🎬 Creating a Song Remix Project for Your Music Class using Soundtrap and Neural Mix Pro

UPDATE: I talk about this project on the latest episode of my podcast, as well as two other Soundtrap project ideas. Listen and subscribe below.

Last week I mused on Twitter about the subject of teaching harmony to middle school students.

In the opening Tweet of that thread, I shared a project idea for my middle school General Music II class and provided a sample of student work. Be sure to read the whole thread for more context.

🧵I am doing remix assignments in @Soundtrap with my middle school General Music II class. They submit songs, vote on them, and then I extract the vocal line and make a template with the tempo/key matched so that the loops sound decent. Here is a recent student submission: pic.twitter.com/D52vahdNDa

— Robby Burns (@robbyburns) April 12, 2021

Here is a brief description of how I set that up.

If I don’t have the track, I use Downie or ViDL to download it from YouTube as an mp3.

For the vocal track, I am using Neural Mix Pro, which allows you to import any song and separate the voice, drums, and other accompaniment parts separately from one another. The results aren’t perfect, but they are beyond acceptable for a project like this.

Neural Mix Pro.

Once I turn down the drums/accompaniment, I export the resulting sound as a new file on my computer. On export, Neural Mix will tell you the key and BPM of the exported track. If the song is something awkward like 83.6 BPM, you can tell it to export at something sane like, 84 BPM and Neural Mix will adjust the final file accordingly.

Neural Mix isn’t cheap. It’s 50 dollars. But it does the job quickly and reliably while offering the user good control over the results. If you do not have access to something like this, there are tons of places you can find isolated vocal stems, like for example, the reddit community r/IsolatedVocals

In Soundtrap, I set the project up using my district’s LMS, Canvas. If you are using an LMS, you should be able to create an assignment and have it link out to Soundtrap as an “external tool.” If you can do this, you can create a template in Soundtrap that will already be set up for your students when they click the link.

When I set up this template, I set the project’s key and tempo to match that of my exported file from Neural Mix. I drag the vocal-only track I exported from Neural Mix from my desktop into Soundtrap and it automatically makes a new audio track for me. Once the vocal track is imported, I have to slide it around left and right until the first measure of the song lands precisely on beat one. If the vocal part has an introduction or pickup note, you will need to consider that and make sure to tell your students that the loop accompaniment starts on a different measure than one.

Set your project key and tempo to match the song.

Once this is set up correctly, save the results. When choosing Soundtrap as the external tool for your LMS assignment, a mini Soundtrap shows up within your LMS (or at least it does in Canvas), and you can navigate to your pre-made template. Having the tempo and key preset for them ensures that the loops all sound mostly decent. It is still possible to wreak chaos, but it is enough structure that some of the loops will end up sounding pleasant.

There is a video at the top of this post covering everything I just explained. Hope it helps.

App of the Week: Neural Mix Pro

I have been testing out a Mac App called Neural Mix Pro, made by the people who make the popular DJay App for macOS and iOS.

It promises to take songs in your music library and hard drive and independently isolate vocals, drums, and other accompaniment so that they can be separated and mixed independently.

It works. I haven't played with it enough to know the breadth of its capability, but I tested the following songs, and they worked enough that I think I would use this tool for future music projects and teaching resources.

• Blues for Time: a fusion song in a drum set method book I assign often. I already had a drum-less version of the track, but the one I could make in Neural Mix Pro was satisfactory. There are some artifacts when you filter out instruments, but that was to be expected. No vocals on this track, but drums and other accompaniment separated correctly.
• Material Girl, Madonna: The vocals and electronic drums are so heavy in this track that isolating just the accompaniment instruments resulted in the correct instruments but not with an EQ that I would use for anything professionally. The vocals and drums sounded ok when separated.
• Jesus Walks, Kanye West: very satisfactory separation of drums, accompaniment, vocals. The backup vocals in the intro are tied to the vocal track, however. No way to separate that. With Neural Mix, you can export just one of the three tracks and apply a target key or tempo to change to it. I exported this tune to an even 80 bpm (it was around 78.x bpm, to begin with) into Logic Pro and has some fun toying around with adding my own improvisations using software instruments. I can see how this could be a useful tool for DJs, music producers, and music educators alike.

Here is a video of my quick demo. I made this on a computer with limited access to my music library and no real goal in mind other than to play around. Let me know if there is something you think I should test in the app.

I can see this app being useful in the music classroom for a few reasons. In my general music class, where we use Soundtrap to produce music, I could giving students a vocal track for a pop song and having them remix it. The results in Neural Mix are, by far, good enough for student use, and I imagine my students having a blast with this.

I could also use this in private lessons by taking songs my students drum along to and making "Minus One" recordings out of them that don't any longer have the drums. Alternatively, I could make them a drum-only version of a song to study the details more closely.

This would be more useful you could separate other instruments than just drums. Taking an instrumentalist out of a jazz record to create a track to improvise over is one of a handful of possibilities that immediately popped into my head. Perhaps these features are in store for a future update. Or maybe this app will remain geared towards pop music, DJs, and music producers. Either way, I can see myself using it on my never-ending quest to make fun play-along tracks for the band to play along to.