NO, Thank You! - Guitar 2 Only (Highest Quality)【AZUSA】K-On!!

Описание: All parts canonically played by Azusa Nakano (中野 梓) on Mut-tan (むったん) in the full version of けいおん！！S2ED2!!
I use these for 3D music in VRC but I want to share them because the quality is so uniquely high!
Spotlights show what instruments are playing ("C-R / R / C-L" are just the panning positions center-right, right, center-left), the other visuals are just for fun! Instrument tracks are -4dB from the original to prevent all extra peaking. Sync with the other tracks is perfect.

AZUSA SPECIFIC DESCRIPTION:
*FX: Sections of Mugi's FX and Azusa's guitar weren't removed from any of the CD releases before isolation, which means they ended up way too quiet after the first isolation step. I boosted the guitar to the original volume in Azusa's track only, which sadly added a lot of background noise (sounds acceptable when recombined with Yui's track) and Mugi's FX. Some parts had to be eased in or else the echo from the previous guitar part would sound too crazy.

It's possible to split Azusa's Muttan into 2 more videos but that's only for the few double guitar parts at the start that repeat twice later, so I didn't think that was worth it to do. They're both near the center so it isn't as easy as just playing left/right channel only. To isolate them, make the stereo into two center-panned monos, and give one side -4dB with phase inversion.





NO, THANK YOU! DESCRIPTION:
YES, Thank you to all the average cake & tea enjoyers!! I went all out on this one as it will most likely be the last of the official isolated INSTRUMENTS with this level of quality. Well, I say that, but there's a lot more crackling than usual, especially in the vocals because the song seems to be rendered in too high volume. It's fine when all played together, but after isolating the tracks all these masked clip-peaks become very audible, but the producers obviously didn't need to have what I'd do a decade later in mind! (Although they did fix this in the high-res release which I could only use to isolate a few songs' lead vocals. They sound really cool like a stage effect but have a lot of background noise still in them)

The metronome seemed also distorted by this clipping, so it's impossible to fully remove it at times, so it's more audible than in any other video (AI also couldn't work). I still tried to mitigate every hit, balancing remaining metronome noise with extra bg/crackling. It's very noticeable at the quiet bridge part, but luckily I managed to save most of that part with some more phasing trickery. I used to think only Go! Go! MANIAC & Listen!! were possible to isolate in great quality, specifically due to the metronomes, so I'm happy I still got so close with this & the other tracks!

I also actually worked like 3 times as much on the video as on the audio (mostly due to laggy editing)! Maybe to compensate for the kinda disappointing audio, but also cause I imagined cool lighting effects for Mugi & Azusa. Also, people liked Ritsu's snare hits a lot so I wanted to do some proper rhytm sync, but then I couldn't leave out the others..! I truly perfectly wasted my potential, cause it was all done manually! I'm never gonna spend this much time on the video aspect again if I continue!! (You're here for the tracks, video was just supposed to be an excuse to put it on YouTube :P, although I WAS able to use this extra time to make some final improvements to the sound)





GENERAL DESCRIPTION:
No AI or other filters were used at all. It's isolated using only phase cancellation. This noise cancelling technique is applied in many layers to the special instrumental versions of this song taken from one of the K-On CD releases. In each of those instrumental tracks a different instrument has been removed by the creators, kinda like instrumental karaokes. Basically what I did is I magically inverted everything across each other in a very specific way, to make the instrument which is missing in those tracks the only one playing in mine!

You might think that it's way easier to simply put the missing instrument track over the full instrumental track. While that's true, you can't get the same quality isolation this way - at least for this song - because of major rendering differences between these tracks. Look at the tutorial I made in the playlist description for more details:
   • Go! Go! MANIAC - All Isolated Tracks in HD...  

I think the very quiet parts from the other instruments carrying over is mostly from the many small audio compression differences between the tracks, although I kinda like it like that. It feels like the sound is bleeding over from them wearing headphones, playing along to the song or something

Thanks for listening, use this as you wish!