I sometimes make live DJ mixes and remixes in Live and was just wondering if there is any device or rack out there that simulates the stems type of function in Serato, Rekordbox, Traktor, Virtual DJ, and so on? It is basically something to isolate the kick, hats, melodics, vocals, and so on to enable on the fly remixing when playing live.

Just curious, or is the EQs that are the only option?

Just wondering because it's sometimes useful when mixing techno to only have a stem from another track playing, such as just the hats or just the bells from Jeff Mills' The Bells

 

I don't know if anything like this exists. You could use RipX to generate stems, but it's rather slow. Or Virtual DJ, which sounds best of all realtime algorithms. If you use the feature to save stems in VDJ, you get a multichannel aac file with 5 stereo stems in it which can be openend in audition and resaved to stereo files to use in Ableton.

 

Yeah, that solution is pretty good but doesn't really meet the on the fly and spontaneous kind of approach to it though.

It would be great if there was a M4L device that was some buttons where on pressing them, they would isolate the various stems of the playing track. Surely it must be do-able for someone who know how to create M4L devices?! I assume its just a case of a button to trigger a macro of EQs and filters to expose the relevant part of the track, e.g. where a "Hi hát" button would in the background add a high band pass EQ and a high pass filter to try and isolate just the hats?! Not as fool proof as VDJs stems, but maybe an idea?!