Does my music get uploaded somewhere?

No. The splitting runs in your own browser, on your own graphics card, so the song never leaves your computer. I wrote about how that works on the blog.

How good is the result?

Good enough to play with, not good enough to release. On a dense mix you can sometimes hear a trace of the removed guitar. With your own guitar on top you stop noticing.

Is there a delay between picking a note and hearing it?

A small one, and how small depends on your interface. I measured it and wrote down the numbers.

Nothing right now. If that changes one day, there will still be a free way to use it.

Does it work with bass or acoustic guitar?

You can mute the bass instead of the guitar and play bass along, though the amp is voiced for electric guitar. Acoustic guitars in a recording are removed less cleanly than electric ones.

Take the guitar out of the record. Play the part yourself.

Guitaroke is karaoke for guitar players. You load a song, it removes the guitar, and you plug in and play along with the rest of the band.

Open Guitaroke

The Guitaroke amp panel: channel switch, preset display, effect switches and tone knobs — The amp. Three channels, six effects, and presets you can store. This is the real thing, not a mock-up.

How it goes

You load a song from your computer: an mp3, wav, m4a or flac. It starts playing right away, the way it was recorded.

Then you press Remove guitar. The song is split into drums, bass, vocals, piano, guitar and the rest. On a recent laptop this takes about as long as making a coffee, and it only happens once per song.

After that you plug in. Your guitar goes through an amp and pedals in the browser. Guitaroke listens to the guitar it just removed, picks a tone in the same neighbourhood and sets your volume to sit where the original did.

The Guitaroke pedalboard: noise gate, overdrive, speaker cabinet, chorus, delay and reverb pedals — The pedals. They open from the amp when you want to turn a knob, and stay out of the way when you do not.

What else is in there

A loop with two markers, so you can go round the same eight bars until your fingers get it. Tempo from half speed up to a bit faster than the record, without changing the pitch. A mixer with a fader for every part, so you can also drop the vocals or push the drums. A tuner. Your own tones saved as numbered presets, the way a rack preamp does it.

The Guitaroke mixer with a fader per instrument, and the panel for your own guitar with a tuner — One fader per part of the band, with the guitar from the recording muted. On the right, your own level and the tuner.

Three things it replaces

Guitar backing tracks, because the backing track is now the record itself. A separate amp simulator, because the amp is in the same page as the song. And the app you used to slow a song down and loop it.

What you need

An electric guitar, an audio interface to plug it into, headphones, and Chrome on a computer. That is all. Nothing to install.

It does not run on phones, and laptop speakers are a bad idea: they add delay and feed back into the microphone.

Try it

It is free and there is no account. Plug your guitar in first, then open it in Chrome.

Open Guitaroke

A desktop version

A browser adds a little delay between the string and your headphones. I am planning a version you install, for players who want that delay as short as their interface allows. There is no date yet. If you want to hear when it exists, send me an email and tell me whether you are on a Mac or on Windows.

Questions people ask

Does my music get uploaded somewhere?: No. The splitting runs in your own browser, on your own graphics card, so the song never leaves your computer. I wrote about how that works on the blog.
How good is the result?: Good enough to play with, not good enough to release. On a dense mix you can sometimes hear a trace of the removed guitar. With your own guitar on top you stop noticing.
Is there a delay between picking a note and hearing it?: A small one, and how small depends on your interface. I measured it and wrote down the numbers.
What does it cost?: Nothing right now. If that changes one day, there will still be a free way to use it.
Does it work with bass or acoustic guitar?: You can mute the bass instead of the guitar and play bass along, though the amp is voiced for electric guitar. Acoustic guitars in a recording are removed less cleanly than electric ones.