Karaoke stems in a weekend

The karaoke problem

Karaoke tracks live or die on one thing: can you actually hear yourself? If there's vocal ghosting, people feel like they're singing with a shadow. It's weird.

So we ran the full mixes through vocal removal and kept the residuals as backing tracks. Clean enough to sing over, punchy enough to still feel like the real song.

How we organized it

Sorted by tempo and genre. Made it way easier to spot weird artifacts and compare similar tracks back-to-back.

When something felt thin, we'd add just a tiny bit of the isolated vocal back. Weird trick, but it fills things out.

Weekend numbers

54 songs in. 49 came out ready to use. The other five needed a quick balance tweak—done before lunch on Sunday.