Yamaha has announced its Extrack app for iOS and Android, an application which allows musicians to more effectively jam, practice and learn their favourite songs by playing along with optimised versions of recordings.
The app has already debuted in Japan and is now coming to the US and European markets. It uses stem separation and chord transcription technology to address the two main issues musicians often find when they want to practice certain music — knowing what chords to play and being heard in the original mix.
Stem separation has long been used in the professional arena to separate out different parts of a track (when you don’t have access to the original multitrack recordings). More recently it has rolled out into a number of popular DAWs. Now it’s even more accessible to the average musician by being bundled in a mobile app.
Yamaha’s proprietary stem separation technology can extract individual instruments parts such as guitar, drums, bass, piano and vocals; these can then be adjusted or dropped out depending on which part the musician wants to hear or play over.
The automatic transcription allows users to learn songs by providing the main chord structure as notation, tablature and chord charts. The app can also analyse the song structure, then allow for repeating, measure skipping, and playback speed adjustment or transposition.
It’s not immediately clear which devices the app will function on, although audio processing of this nature is a fairly professor intensive operation so presumably a more recent iPhone or Android device is preferable.
There are two versions. The free (forever, according to Yamaha) allows four instrument separation on up to five songs per month, while a $5.99 per month/$39.99 per year subscription offers seven instrument separation and unlimited songs.
Users already familiar with DAWs may already be playing with stem separation, but this app offers an all-in-one streamlined solution for the audio already on a user’s phone, with a number of playback and learning features not necessarily available on a stock DAW.
Find out more at the Extrack product page.
