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You can cover a lot with great production. Have you ever wondered how good some of your favourite singers really were when there's nothing underneath their voice? A YouTube site called "Isolated Tracks" lets you hear the real deal.
The page offers up the vocals from some famous singers without all the accompaniment that you hear on their records or on the radio. How do they sound with nothing but a naked vocal? Now you can find out. It makes you appreciate just how talented they were.
Among those featured:
Marvin Gaye's solo vocals for "I Heard It Through The Grapevine
George Harrison crooning "Something" with no background music
Michael Jackson doing "Billie Jean" and
David Bowie's non-musical take on "Space Oddity"
It's a fascinating re-listen to songs you know all too well but have never quite heard this way before. And it's not just vocals. The site also features isolated guitar riffs and other instrumentals from famous songs before they were put into the final mix.
Not sure where they got all of these from, but they certainly present a new way of listening to some old classic rock tunes
Isolated Tracks
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RA, thanks for the link.
This one isn't on there but it showcases some brilliant base playing and drumming from the prog rock universe.
YES - Close to the Edge Isolated Bass & Drums Track (Squire & Bruford)
Last edited by SpinningWheel (September 14, 2025 8:40 pm)
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...and now the isolated bass track from "...And Justice For All"
(70 minutes of silence)
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With AI websites - or even running locally or with audio tool plug-ins - one can upload a song (or point to a Youtube URL) and get some surprisingly good instrumental extractions - "unswirling the paint" as it were. ("Wired" had a great piece on some of that process back in 2021.)
As someone always fascinated by remixes and stems it's a great time to experiment with some of that stuff.
There was an old UK TV series, "Classic Albums", that would profile an album per TV episode, and they would frequently go back to the multitrack masters at the mixing console and play the various individual tracks with the recording engineer or producer talking through them - great stuff: