Isolating tracks from a 5.1 mix

torkolort

Inspired
There are a number of backing tracks online that have the guitar tracks isolated out of the original, making it barely audible, and perfect to play along with. They are originally mixed in 5.1 surround. Does anyone how to do this? I tried to google but either I suck at it or there isn't that much info about it. Also, is this there a technique for doing this with regular mixed tracks as well?

Thanks!
 
The backing tracks you are hearing are coming from the Guitar Hero/ Rockband video games.
The original master tracks have been made available to the makers of these games.
You can play the songs in the games with vocals,guitars,bass, or drums removed.
You can output from your tv or receiver into your recording software on your computer (or portable recording device) to record the backing tracks you want.
Guitarbackingtrack.com has many of them available for free download.
 
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dont know if it is still like that, but at least some years ago the backing tracks on Guitarbackingtrack.com really sucked and sounded like cheap midi files. I used to download the tracks from guitarbt.com, i think they sounded way better. Other than that there are tools like waves center (Waves Center. Play the stereo field.) where you can adjust the volume of center and sides seperatly, so you could try do bring down the sides as mostly guitars are panned hard left and right. otoh, that might kill the drum overheads as well.
 
Yeah there are some tracks available at guitarbackingtrack.com. In my experience, guitarbt.com and guitarbackingtrack.com have pretty much the same tracks, but the selection on guitarbackingtrack is somewhat better. I've discovered five types of backing tracks, when looking for Dream Theater songs:

1. Midi tracks exported from Guitar Pro
2. User programmed midi tracks
3. User recorded tracks
4. 5.1 surround mix, guitar nearly isolated
5. Guitar Hero tracks, guitar isolated
6. The actual tracks from the original

The first two are the majority of tracks at least for my music, and they are simply horrible. I'd rather apply a nail gun to my ears than playing over those midi tracks. The user recorded are somewhat better but there are very few of them.

The 4th one works very well. On guitarbackingtrack they have some tracks from the Systematic Chaos album and some from the Live at Budokan DVD. The audio in both these are 5.1 surround mix. A while ago, there was a thread on guitarchaos.com where someone posted all of the songs from Systematic Chaos with the guitar tracks almost gone. Guitar Hero tracks would be even better, but I think they only have one Dream Theater song on GH...

The 6th only applies for the latest Dream Theater album, as the isolated tracks were included in the album's special edition.

Would be awesome if I could isolate those 5.1 tracks myself. Anyone done that before?

@Frozen
Thanks, I'm gonna take a look at that. I guess it's impossible to remove an instrument from a regular mixed song, but maybe adjusting the volume could tame the guitars making it better to play along the original.

Also, I saw a youtube movie where I guy used Audacity to remove the vocals from a song. Don't remember exactly what he did, but it was something about splitting the track into two stereo tracks and add an effect in Audacity called invert. It worked pretty well, but I don't understand how it works. Didn't say anything about muting other instruments, it only muted the vocals.
 
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