Well gentlemen (and any ladies watching), I think we have success!

I upgraded to Studio One ver 7 and asked it to separate the bass on the above song by The Fortunes. This test-case is no mamby-pamby test case, it’s a stress-test; intentionally chosen for the low-end brass in contains. We might call it a “tuba test”.

There is so much that can be said here. The software team at Presonas knocked this out of the park. It isn’t perfect but is definitely something musicians can work with. I hear no brass, the bass that is retained makes melodic and rhythmic sense to me, there are no erroneous gaps and I can even hear the slides that he’s doing on his neck.

I exported this out in WAV format but that’s a moot point because SoundCloud will certainly step on it in its processing. FWIW, I hear no meaningful difference between the original WAV and what is up on SoundCloud.

I’d be interested in the perspectives of any audiophiles or bass players. To me, it sounds like he’s using a pick, which maybe he is on the original recording or maybe it’s an artifact of the separation process. There also seems to be a bunch of reverb present and it's a bit wobbly. But these are nits, it extracted a usable bass line from within a cloud of other instruments competing in the same frequency range and that just blows me away.

Note that Presonas’ solution didn’t care one bit about this being a 60s song or that it was compressed to keep the YouTube people happy. Most likely they trained it on “messy”, compressed, real-world training sets and that, in part, is why it works. If I were on the team, that's what I would push for; train on the lowest common denominator.

This thread is titled "State-of-the-art Stem Separation for Bass", based on one attempt with Studion One and imho, Presonas has achieved the state-of the-art and I'm guessing they're hard at work on 7.1 and beyond.

Very cool stuff!

Separated Bass Stem


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For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.