How to Make a Song Instrumental – Blog

Song instrumentals are an essential part of modern music production.

The term “instrumental” can refer to a style of music where the arrangement inherently contains no vocals, or it can refer to all of the components of a song that does have vocals, but with the vocals omitted. In this article, we’ll focus on the latter, which can be an important asset for music producers to prepare for various collaborative and revenue-generating opportunities.

See the table of contents below to easily navigate to a specific section.

What you’ll learn:

Let’s dive right in!

An introduction to making instrumentals from a song

Making an instrumental requires you to separate a song into its distinct musical layers. These peeled-back bundles of your individual tracks, or stems, add up to comprise your instrumental, and may be used in contexts like live performances, remixes, karaoke tracks, and sync licensing. All of these are opportunities which, if aligned with your values and career goals, can boost both your reach and revenue as a musician.

A clean instrumental version should sound balanced, full, and true to the character of the original song. Achieving that balance can be tricky, especially when removing elements that are deeply integrated into the mix—notably vocals. That said, with the right approach and tools, you can learn how to quickly prepare an instrumental as a final step of your production process, while maintaining both quality and depth.

What is stem separation (and why is it important)?

Stem separation is the process of splitting a song into isolated components—what we’ve broadly described thus far. Each of these stems will typically represent a single sound or a group of similar sounds, and the total number will vary widely depending on your production’s complexity.

Having separated stems available for your project will allow any future collaborator to process and further manipulate them as needed.

As a general guideline, to prepare your stems for a song instrumental, start with:

• Vocals: All together, as well as further separation of any backing vocals or harmonies
• Drums and percussion: Think all of your punchy, less melodic elements
• Bass: Including acoustic and electric basses as well as deep synths occupying the same frequencies
• Core melodic instruments: Guitars, keyboards, strings, etc.

How to make a song instrumental without losing quality

A quality instrumental preserves the balance and energy of your overall song, and when done correctly, it should feel natural and complete in its own right. If you give this a go and find that some elements sound hollow or distorted, there’s still work to do.

But what exactly goes into the process of making a song instrumental? Depending on your production and what you have access to, the process can either be relatively straightforward or technically challenging—which is why much like mastering, there are plenty of creators who pass their work on to a different engineer to manage it.

If you have the original production session with every element already perfectly isolated, in theory creating a song instrumental could be as simple as muting the vocals and bouncing the rest of the arrangement. However, some potential challenges that can arise include an effect or plugin behaving in a different way without the vocals, phase issues, undesirable frequency gaps, etc. Below, we go over a few ways to handle these problems effectively.

Separating your stems within the DAW

Each tool has its strengths. Some focus on speed, while others prioritize accuracy or deep editing capabilities. For producers, the choice of what to use can depend on whether you need stems for creative remixing, high-quality mastering, or clean instrumentals for release.

Your first step is to determine how much control you want in the process. If you want to have complete control, in a DAW like Ableton you can simply change the track from “Master” to “All Individual Tracks.”

Meanwhile, if you’re a Fender Studio Pro (formerly Studio One Pro) user, this particular DAW has a built-in and full-fledged stem separator. Whatever workstation you’re using, it can be worth taking a few minutes to investigate what its dedicated stem separation features (if any) look like.

And if you need some extra help with restoration or repair, you can use specialized plugins like iZotope’s RX, which offers spectral editing and “Music Rebalance” features. This is one way to troubleshoot your stems if they have unexpected effects, mic bleed, noise, or other timbral qualities that you’d like to clean up.

Tip: Once you’ve exported your stems, you can always bring them into a different session for further shaping, polishing, and tweaking for whatever use awaits them.

Song instrumentals with third-party platforms

While having direct access to the original files is always ideal for audio quality, with today’s technology, you actually don’t need the original session to make instrumentals. Albeit with some margin for error and risk of accuracy, there are a number of third-party stem separation tools out there that can isolate elements like your drums, bass, or other instruments directly from a single .wav file.

There will be some producers who aren’t proponents of this method, as it offers less agency over the process and can raise concerns of file quality and security. Still, these tools are constantly innovating, and at worst are available to us for emergencies when a surprise opportunity comes up and your mixing engineer or backup hard drive isn’t reachable.

Monitoring phase and frequencies

When isolating or removing vocals, one of the biggest risks with handing over your master track to an AI tool is phase issues. This is because vocals often sit across frequency ranges and blend naturally with other instruments. Simply “subtracting” the vocal frequencies can create holes in the mix or leave behind ghost-like remnants of the voice.

You can minimize these issues yourself by:

• Relying heavily on your spectral editing tools to target only the vocal formants
• Applying subtle EQ to attenuate unwanted peaks or restore frequencies lost in the separation
• Using stereo imaging to rebalance instruments that may have been impacted during isolation

File formats and other risks with stem isolation

Whatever your method of creating an instrumental for your track, try to avoid .mp3 and other lossy audio file formats. By exporting a .wav or other forms of lossless audio formats, you can maximize the sonic accuracy of your instrumental.