JBL Bluetooth Band Box - very interesting

guitars4you

https://guitar.com/news/gear-news/jbl-bandbox/?utm_source=Guitar.com&utm_campaign=dbf20164dd-nl_w2_2y26_weekly_digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-a095523ec7-50524348

These will no doubt find an audience among Bluetooth speaker fans and general audiophiles, onboard stem separation makes them an alluring prospect for musicians looking to upgrade their practice. Ever wished you could remove the solo from your favourite track so you can play along yourself? With BandBox, you can.

octatonic

You can do this with pretty much every DAW now, either natively or via a plugin and have been able to do it for the last couple of years.

Interesting to see it built into a practice amp.
I reckon the quality will be worse than what we are used to in DAW's, which is ... imperfect.

Jonathangus

https://thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/comment/4310431/#Comment_4310431

guitars4you

octatonic said:

You can do this with pretty much every DAW now, either natively or via a plugin and have been able to do it for the last couple of years.

Interesting to see it built into a practice amp.
I reckon the quality will be worse than what we are used to in DAW's, which is ... imperfect.

I don’t do plugins and have a natural process of not knowing my way around a laptop - So a stand alone box ’ appeals to me far more 

monquixote

If you want to play an instrument through a portable speaker I'd get a Mini Rig.

TheBigDipper

I've played around with the stem splitter function inside Logic to help me break out parts to learn something. It's often helpful, but it can only do what it can do. So recordings with multi-guitar parts still leave all the guitars on the one isolated track. If it is capable of hearing two guitars in a stereo mix and then splitting them out onto separate tracks, I'm not aware of it.

Sometimes it is really helpful and sometimes not so much. If it could isolate Richard Lloyd from Tom Verlaine, isolate/mute Tom  and let me play along with Richard, I'd be very happy. Or split out Malcom from Angus. But I don't think this technology can do that just yet. 

Danny1969

I use isolated tracks a lot because, after 42 years of gigging my ears are a bit tired to say the least. Sometimes the guitar parts are so buried under synths I really can't hear what the guitar is doing as the frequency range is so similar. I accept the artifacts in AI splitting, it's far from perfect but does allow me to hear the part easier. 

But I'm too tight to pay £200 ish will carry on using a Macbook and AI 

richh

What AI works well for you?  I've tried Moises, with variable results.  But I guess it depends on the source material that it has to work with?

Danny1969

richh said:

What AI works well for you?  I've tried Moises, with variable results.  But I guess it depends on the source material that it has to work with?

I've tried LALAL and FADR and they are good for drums and the vocal but can't split guitar that well from instruments with a similar frequency range.

Being lazy by nature the first thing I will do is look for an isolated track someone else has already done. Youtube and google etc ..there are quite a few now on YT

https://linktr.ee/isolatedtracks

There is a very primitive but cheap gadget you can make yourself that works in real time in terms of removing the loudest elements of a mix, such as the snare and lead vocal etc. Basically anything mixed central.

Get a 3.5mm aux cable and chop one end off. There's 3 wires. Connect the ground wire to pin 1 of an XRL. Connect the other two wires to pin 2 and pin 3 of the XRL. Doesn't matter which way round really.

Now use that cable to connect your phone / iPod etc into any balanced differential input ..basically the mic input of a desk, audio interface, PA speaker etc. These are all differential inputs

A differential input only outputs the difference between it's 2 inputs (pin 2 and 3 of an XLR) So when you use this cable everything mixed in the centre, and thus common to both pin 2 and pin 3, will be nulled. This will leave you everything that is mixed to either side, which is quite often guitars and that enables you to hear them better.

I have a little box I made in the middle of my cable with a switch,  so I can plug my phone into the desk at rehearsal and flip the switch to enable this mode.

Gagaryn

I got the little Solo today. Early impressions are amp sounds are acceptable for my intended usage which is as a portable practice tool - they aren't brilliant but I expected this! The AI Stem splitting works well. Sounds decent as a bluetooth speaker - perfectly usable and better than its size might make you think. I'm happy with it - does what I hoped - easily portable little speaker that I can use to jam over songs. It's an excellent little practice tool.