New album Foregone out February 2023

[The Grayfox]

Yeah, for sure! I had no idea the software had come along like this. The power of AI and Deep Learning I guess. It struggles isolating the vocals in decent quality, but who gives a fuck about that when it comes to IF? Maybe for comedy value that final scream on TJR is actually pretty funny without any music behind it.

But yeah, fuck, I wish this kind of thing had existed ten years ago when I was doing vocal covers. Instead of scouring YouTube to find some half-decent sounding instrumental cover I could have just ripped the actual fucking song in almost perfect form without vocals. God fucking damn it. I'm long past being able to do those vocals now so it exists too little too late nonetheless, it's really cool listening to the IF back catalogue in instrumental form.

Also I actually did plan to do a Battles song but found that I had apparently deleted Battles at some point as it's nowhere to be found in my storage oh well.

It actually gives me hope that maybe someday there will be software that will allow people to extract the stems from songs. That would be limitless potential to remix and remaster stuff that isn't up to par. This seems like a gamechanger for vocal covers. I've seen so many with really bad backing tracks. Awful sounding midi drums (even worse than Battles!), piss poor sounding guitar work and many other problems. This is definitely a step in the right direction.

Start drinking tea with lemon, warm up those chords and give us some good vocals for Battles.

 

[DE4life]

I've been thinking recently about how much I like STYE. At the time of release, I was pretty 'meh' about it. I was at the show in Los Angeles in '04 for the DVD shoot. I don't think they ended up using that footage though. I think they used Sticky Fingers and Hammersmith footage (there may be some bonus content of Clayman and Episode 666 from LA?) It was pretty interesting getting to see the album played in it's entirety. Also the Blinded By Fear cover and a nice selection of old school songs. Dead Alone is a great song.

I had disdain for most of STYE for a long time. There were a few songs I liked (TQP, funnily enough, as well as MSS & Evil in a Closet) but I mostly considered the album nu metal trash. It was only when I watched the Used & Abused DVD again some years ago that my mindset on STYE totally changed. Suddenly I kind of got what they were going for, and it clicked for me in a way it hadn't before. Now I don't mind the album. Still not one of my favourites, and not an album I go back to regularly, but I don't dislike it either. It has a very specific sound that I don't mind going back to every so often.

It actually gives me hope that maybe someday there will be software that will allow people to extract the stems from songs. That would be limitless potential to remix and remaster stuff that isn't up to par. This seems like a gamechanger for vocal covers. I've seen so many with really bad backing tracks. Awful sounding midi drums (even worse than Battles!), piss poor sounding guitar work and many other problems. This is definitely a step in the right direction.

Start drinking tea with lemon, warm up those chords and give us some good vocals for Battles.

I'm sure that stuff will come, and it will be really cool when it does. Basically like having your own master tapes to work with. Vocal covers either tend to use poor quality instrumental covers or the vocalist just screams over the actual track, which to my ears always sounds horrible I was somewhat fortunate back in the day that Schehf was outputting decent quality stuff that I could use. Otherwise I would have been fucked and probably not even bothered. With that said, if programs like the ones that exist today were around back then I might have destroyed my vocal chords trying to do every IF song, so maybe it is for the best that it wasn't around

As far as Battles is concerned, nope. No amount of vocal improvements could save that shitheap. I'd probably just make them worse out of pure spite.

 

[DE4life]

Interestingly UVR seems to really struggle with Fear is the Weakness. Haven't tried any other SOAPF tracks but it doesn't do this one well at default settings at all. Vocal stem is actually pretty good but it often registers the guitar sound as a vocal.

 

[ThePhobiac]

Malware, are you sure? None of my antivirus programs picked up anything like that.

Edit: Just ran scans with MalwareBytes and Spybot Search and Destroy and they didn't pick up anything... could be that they'e out of date I gues? Idk, @ThePhobiac let me know what malware was installed and I'll take a look and see if it's on my PC as well.

Nah, I was just joking a bit. I probably should have made it more obvious. No problems with the program whatsoever.

 

[cutamerc]

DE4life, these instrumental uploads are fantastic. Thank you for the uploads. Sleepless again flows so great! Any chance you will be uploading these to YouTube for everyone's listening pleasure? I am one of the few who generally like Ander's vocals, but having the discography in instrumental form on shuffle has major appeal!

 

[DE4life]

Nah, I was just joking a bit. I probably should have made it more obvious. No problems with the program whatsoever.

Malware ain't something you joke about, muthafucka

DE4life, these instrumental uploads are fantastic. Thank you for the uploads. Sleepless again flows so great! Any chance you will be uploading these to YouTube for everyone's listening pleasure? I am one of the few who generally like Ander's vocals, but having the discography in instrumental form on shuffle has major appeal!

Hadn't thought about uploading them to YouTube tbh, would they get copyright striked? Also worth noting that whilst these are cool, I'm pretty sure someone who understands the software better than me could get superior results. I'm just running everything on the default setting. I've noticed that at that setting it doesn't deal well with high guitar tone (or wahh pedal) and keys can be affected as well. You hear it especially on the Suburban Me rip - the end of the solo gets fucked up, and the keys in the chorus should be a bit louder. Could be fixed with some manual editing I guess, but also if the settings were tweaked that could probably be fixed as well.

 

[DE4life]

Another couple instrumentalised:

Artifacts of the Black Rain - this one came out pretty well!



Evil in a Closet - this one came out really well, it sounds gorgeous! One minor drop out in the solo, but I'd actually never taken notice of those synths behind the guitars in the chorus until listening to this version:



I tried Zombie Inc as well, but sadly that one didn't turn out so good.

 

[DE4life]

Oh, also, the final scream in TJR...



I can't stop laughing

 

[eochaid]

WTF?

 

[DE4life]

It's killing me the 'agghghghghhh' at the end... he sounds like he's being strangled

 

[DE4life]

A couple of oldies from Lunar Strain - In Flames came out really well, Upon an Oaken Throne somewhat good but again cuts off the screechier higher tone of the guitar in parts.

In Flames



This section from the vocal stem is pretty cool as well:



Upon an Oaken Throne



I have to note listening to the vocal stems that Stanne is a far more competent vocalist than Anders. Even on Lunar Strain it's really obvious how much better he is than Anders at this point in time.

Also, Come Clarity, seemed to come out pretty well:



Interesting to hear some synths in here that are very similar to the synths in STYE.

 

[DE4life]

This one's for @Jabi ... As The Future Repeats Today - it came out good, even kept the solo completely in tact.

 

[DE4life]

Okay so, just an experiment I put the vocal stem and instrumental stem back together for ATFRT, literally just putting each in a separate track in Cool Edit Pro 2 and to my surprise it sounds identical to the normal song. I thought the vocal stems were of lesser quality but no, they are literally exactly how the vocals sound without music. That's pretty cool.

ATFRT ... as you've never heard it before

 

[ThePhobiac]

Incredible.

Oh shit, you know what that means, though? Theoretically you could transpose the vocal stems from one song into another (as you did with the two Behind Spaces). You could have Anders singing Here Until Forever over Dead Eternity.

 

[The Grayfox]

Anders choking at the end of TJR.

 

[CladInShadows971]

I'd be interested to know how the program is doing that. I used to play around with something similar around 10 years ago which worked by identifying "vocals" as anything which was perfectly balanced between the left and right speakers, because apparently any other instrument is typically at least slightly weighted towards either the left or right. It didn't seem to work as well though, so I wonder if this program is doing something a bit more intelligent.

 

[eochaid]

Put the vocals from Follow Me on CC.

 

[DE4life]

Behind Space '99 with Mikael's vocals from 1994 - had to make a few adjustments in tempo and word spacing here and there, but overall I actually think this sounds really good! Also got rid of the pointless 'spacey' intro at the start and re-added the original outro.

 

[Xpyro125]

Holy shit, hearing "Disconnected" vocals only is so fucking nostalgic for me. I used to love trying to find all the instrumentals and vocal only versions of anything I could find back when I was fucking around with the Periphery Producer Pack. I was always interested in that sort of stuff, but buying that and messing with it on my father's computer here and there (He had Pro Tools because production work, and I had a 2010 Macbook Pro that was on its last legs and was broke as shit) really got me into production and engineering. It was really disheartening to see that it just up and vanished one day.

Best thing we've got at the moment is to scrounge for stems. Some sites have a ton, but they're generally locked behind paywalls, some are just floating out there, some are just best to lift from Guitar Hero/Rock Band, you can download Guitar Pro tabs of varying quality, and then there are artists like Periphery and Matt Guillory (Shit music, just believe me on that) who you can buy the stems from. If nothing else, it's all a fun way to get into amateur production bullshit. Guitar Pro tabs are probably your best bet for just fucking around with the tracks and getting a feel for them, even if they aren't the actual stems.

-Also, never realized just how godly "Gyroscope"'s instrumentals were. I knew they were great, but goddamn, it really is just more of the best of TJR.
-Man, WEWO seriously lacks power in the chorus without the backing instrumentals. Not even sure what to say there.
-I've always wanted an instrumental version of "Evil in a Closet", I'd very tempted to play it in a D&D campaign if it was up on YouTube. I'm not sure that I would though, simply because it doesn't quite fit as background music for it.

 

[DE4life]

To be honest when you rip the vocal stems from IF tracks you realise there isn't as much power in the vocals as you thought, even on the older albums. The music masks a lot of that. At first I thought the vocal stem was just being extracted badly, but when you marry the vocal and instrumental stem the sound is 100% restored, so it basically is the vocals exactly as they'd sound without the music.

Compare Stanne or Speed's vocals with Anders and it really is night and day difference. Power, rhythm, timing is all far better with the former. The main thing Anders has going for him is that his voice is pretty unique and difficult to replicate. So, that's held him in good stead despite his vocals objectively being... well, not very good.