How to Isolate Drums from a Song (or Remove Them for a Drumless Track)

Two jobs, one pass

Isolating the drums and removing the drums are the same separation looked at from two sides. The model splits the song into vocals, drums, bass and other; the drum stem is one output, and the drumless mix is the other three added back together. The drum extractor page does both from a single run, so you never have to process the song twice.

Step by step

1. Open the drum extractor and drop in the song. Use the cleanest file you have; a WAV or FLAC keeps the cymbal detail the model needs, while a low-bitrate MP3 has already thrown some of it away.
2. The first run downloads the separation model (about 170 MB) into your browser and runs it there, on your graphics card in Chrome or Edge or on the CPU in Safari and Firefox. Nothing is uploaded.
3. When it finishes, download the drum stem, the drumless mix, or both. They are from the same pass and line up exactly.

For drummers: a play-along track

A drumless mix is the practice tool every drummer wanted and almost no record label sold. Load it into a player or DAW, find the tempo from the original, and loop the sections you are working on. Two habits make it useful: keep a click running under it in the DAW, because with the drums gone there is nothing else holding the grid; and keep the original drum stem on a muted track, so you can unmute it to check a fill against what the record actually plays. Bass players get the same thing from the bass extractor, and the two stems together make a rhythm-section-free track for a whole band to rehearse over.

For producers: sampling and chopping the drum stem

Separated drums are a sampling source with no bass or melody in the way, which is exactly what a phase-inverted or EQ-carved break never quite managed. Expect the kick and snare to come back clean and the cymbals to carry a little of the mix with them; a transient shaper or a short gate on the stem tightens the hits, and layering a clean one-shot under the sampled kick hides the rest. As with any sample, clearance is a rights question; separation does not make a break public domain.

For remixers: swapping the groove

The classic remix move is to keep the vocal, the bass and the instruments and replace the drums. Separate once, discard the drum stem, and program or record a new groove under the other three. Because the stems share a timeline, the new drums can be built directly against the vocal's phrasing. If the original bass line was tied to the old kick pattern, the bass extractor gives you that stem on its own, so you can re-time or replace it too.

What separation gets right and wrong on drums

• Kick and snare: reliably in the drum stem, with attack intact. This is where the models are strongest.
• Hi-hats and cymbals: mostly right, but the wash of a crash can bleed into the "other" stem, and a very bright vocal can leave a trace of sibilance in the drums.
• Electronic percussion: usually recognised as drums, but a tonal 808 that doubles as the bass line may be split between the drum and bass stems. Blend the two if you need it whole.
• Room and reverb: the ambience printed on a drum recording stays with the drums, which is what you want for sampling and occasionally not what you want for a drumless track.

Audacity, your DAW, or the browser?

Audacity has no drum isolation effect; its built-in vocal tool is a phase trick that does nothing useful for drums. FL Studio 2024 and Logic Pro 11 include stem separation and produce a drum stem of similar quality inside the project. The browser method needs no install and no upload, and gives you the drumless mix and the drum stem from one pass, which is why it is the quickest route when the drums are all you came for. For a dense or lo-fi mix, the HD Pack and Pro run a larger model on a server GPU and separate the cymbals more cleanly.