Free Guitar Remover: Make a Guitar Backing Track

What a guitar remover takes out

A guitar remover is an AI tool that separates the guitar from a finished song and gives you the rest of the band as a backing track. MuseHub’s guitar remover splits the song into six parts (vocals, drums, bass, guitar, piano and other instruments) and mixes everything except the guitar into one stereo WAV file.

Every guitar in the song goes into the same guitar part. Rhythm and lead, acoustic and electric, and double-tracked parts on the left and right all leave together. The bass guitar has a part of its own and stays in the backing track.

An EQ can’t do this job. A guitar covers roughly 80 Hz to 5 kHz, the same range as the vocal, the piano and the snare, so cutting the guitar cuts them too. Canceling the center of the stereo image misses for another reason. Rhythm guitars are usually panned to the sides, and the trick removes what sits in the middle, which is the vocal, the bass and the kick.

Which guitar parts separate well

How clean the backing track sounds depends on the guitar sound and on what else plays in the same range.

When some guitar is left in the backing track

Solo the piano row and the other instruments row. If you hear guitar in one of them, the model placed part of the guitar there. The Download without guitar file always includes those five parts, so for a cleaner track, download the stems one by one and mix them in an audio editor with that part turned down or left out.

• Use a lossless source. A WAV or FLAC file keeps the detail that tells a guitar from a keyboard. A low-bitrate MP3 has already lost some of it.
• Save your files within seven days. Results are kept for a week, so download the backing track and the guitar stem you want to keep.

Practicing solos and rhythm parts over the band

Solos and lead lines

Removing the guitar takes the rhythm guitar out along with the solo, so a solo section plays as drums, bass, keys and vocals. That leaves plenty of room in the mix, and every note you play is easy to hear.

To keep the rhythm guitar and lose only the solo, put the original song and the backing track on two tracks in an audio editor. Line them up at the start, then switch to the backing track where the solo begins and back to the original where it ends.

For improvising, find the key first. Solo the bass row and play along with its notes in the chorus. The note the bass keeps returning to is usually the key center, and a scale built on it is a safe starting point.

Rhythm parts

For rhythm playing, the drums and bass are what you lock to. Solo them to hear where the kick and the bass notes land, then play the riff with them. Palm mutes that hit with the kick and strumming that follows the hi-hat make a part sit the way it does on the record.

Many rock songs have two rhythm guitars playing the same part, one on each side of the stereo field. Both disappear with the guitar part, so record yourself twice, once for each side, to rebuild that wide sound in your own cover.

Slowing it down

The tool plays the song at its original speed. For a fast solo, download the backing track and change its tempo in Audacity without changing the pitch. Practice at a tempo where you can play the phrase cleanly, then raise it a few percent at a time.

Checking the tuning and capo position

Before you play along, make sure you are in tune with the record. A lot of rock and blues is played with every string tuned down a half step, often called E♭ tuning, and Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan used it on many recordings. Some older records also sit slightly sharp or flat of standard pitch, because the tape ran a little fast or slow during recording or mastering.

• Find the root note. Solo the bass row and play the root of the first chord along with it. If your note sounds slightly sharp or a half step off, the song is not in standard tuning.
• Match the tuning. Retune your guitar to the record, or shift the backing track’s pitch in an audio editor so it lines up with standard tuning. A half-step shift usually sounds fine for practice.
• Look for a capo. Solo the guitar row. Bright, ringing open-string chords in a key such as A or B♭ often mean a capo on G, C or D shapes. Try a capo at the second or third fret and compare.

Matching the record’s guitar tone

Your playing blends with the backing track when your tone sits where the original guitar sat. Solo the guitar row and switch between it and your own sound while you adjust.

• Set the gain lower than you expect. Heavy rhythm tones on records are often two or more guitar tracks stacked together. That stacking adds weight one guitar can’t copy with extra gain, and too much gain also blurs your timing.
• Match the midrange first. The midrange decides whether a guitar cuts through a band. Compare yours with the stem around 500 Hz–2 kHz before you touch the bass or treble.
• Add effects last. Delay and reverb set how far away the guitar sounds on the record. Add them once the dry tone matches.

An amp simulator plugin gets you close without a real amp. The roundup of the best guitar amp plugins compares the main options, and BYOD lets you build a drive chain from modules, including a model of the Tube Screamer overdrive pedal.

Transcribing from the solo’d guitar stem

The guitar stem is the guitar part with the band taken away, which makes it the easiest way to work out a riff or a solo by ear.

1. Loop short phrases. Download the guitar stem, open it in Audacity and loop one or two bars at a time. Slow it down for fast runs.
2. Find the position on the neck. The same note sounds warmer on a thicker string higher up the neck and brighter on a thinner string near the nut. Open strings ringing under a part tie it to the lowest frets.
3. Split doubled parts. When two guitars play on the left and right, split the stereo stem into separate left and right channels to hear each one alone.
4. Write it as tab or notation. Note the rhythm as well as the frets, because the rhythm is what makes the part sound like the record.

Transcription programs can suggest notes from audio and save time on long solos. The best music transcription software lists the options.