Product recommendations- Moises

Multi-tracking made easy!

If you know me by now, you’ll know that I love self-paced online learning! I do it every year, deep dive into a new tool and geek out over it for the next 3-4 months, until inevitably the obsession for said tool starts to wean. So, when at the EMU Word in Song conference, they mentioned that they had developed an app which was going to take your music practice to the next level! I was all for it and wanted so badly to see this thing in action. But alas, I was separated from my wife on the day, and she checked it out on her own. Boo!

So, the tool in mention is the HymnBook app, the main selling point being that you can dive into their library of songs, and take a song and isolate individual tracks, so if you’re the bass player, you can either just hear the bass pard, and attempt to learn the official bass parts with all it’s crazy fills; or keep all elements of the song but remove bass, so during your practice you can step in as the bass player, and feel like you’re a part of the music team! However, when I asked my wife how was the app, she first started with the cost, that licensing for a church of our size (around 100 people), was going to cost around $1600-$1800 per year (money which our church don’t have)- so quickly, my enthusiasm was drastically curbed.

A week later, I checked out the HymnBook web-site, and was pleasantly surprised to find that they offered individual licenses, and  it was $20 per month. And quickly I was back in, I thought for the cost of a meal out, surely I could justify paying that much a month for an awesome tool like that! Even if I had to sacrifice one of my meals out  per month, to make it work.  But then my wife told me that at the demonstration, the spokesperson for the app also informed them that the current library of songs was only around 100 songs. Like what the!? Not only were there only 100 songs, but they were from only a few Christian bands/groups which aligned to EMU music’s theology. Now that doesn’t sound all that useful? Does it?

Then by chance, I was bord one Monday morning (had caught-up to all my current podcasts), so I decided to listen to an old ‘Scott’s Bass Lessons’ podcast, and by chance they mentioned ‘Moises’, a tool which allowed you to split out the different instrument parts from songs recordings, and turn pre-recorded tracks into multi-tracks. Like OMG! This thing was exactly what HymnBook was doing, but now not limited to only 100 select songs!

But the catch was this, you can split out the tracks for any song, as long as you have an MP3 recording of the original song. D’oh!

Now in 2024, how do you get a hold of MP3 recordings? My old iPod Shuffle and the laptop with my iTunes library were long gone! Thrown out in a Council digital collection years ago. D’oh! We have a bunch of original CDs, but at the moment we don’t even have a working CD player, nor a laptop/desktop computer with a CD drive, and in another previous digital collection I had also thrown out my external CD drive! D’oh and double D’oh! And on SBL, they had mentioned you could just buy each individual track off iTunes for a couple of bucks. But who buys music anymore, since everyone streams everything!?

But then I was poking around the web and found a tool which would convert Spotify songs to MP3 (I’m thinking not all that legally though). But I was curious, so I downloaded the application (Hitpaw), and it actually works quite well. Once you select the Spotify to MP3 converter, it asks you to log into your Spotify account, and then in moments you can see all your playlists, and you can easily convert them to MP3 which is then saved to your hard drive. However, there’s also a catch! The free version allows you only 2 free conversions, not a month, but ever! Whilst the paid version is $20 per month, which gives you unlimited conversions. So, we find ourselves back at the $20 per month realm, and this time it’s $20 USD.

But I used one of my 2 free conversions, just to test it out and converted a song we were currently practicing at church where the original recording was in a different key to how we do it, and then took the MP3 recording and plugged it into Moises. And I have to say Moises is a pretty slick tool, within minutes it had split out the song into 4 tracks (the free version only allows for 4 tracks), so you now have the option of isolating vocals, drums, bass and other- and the clarity of each track is flawless! There’s AI in there which does the heavy lifting, so prior to AI, tools like this would just boost one part of the track, but you could always still hear everything else muffled in the background, so that old stuff wasn’t very useful if you wanted to sample a track. But Moises, I’d say it was near perfect, as it was super clear  as if they were using the master tracks where each instrument had been recorded separately, before mixed together. And the free version of Moises allows for 5 uploads a month, which isn’t bad. And the paid version unlocks all features and enables unlimited uploads for only $3.99 USD per month. Literally as cheap as chips!

Now, here is where I started to lose my enthusiasm again, when I tried to use both Hitpaw and Moises on my own with a screen reader (as I’m blind). And I’m sad to say, neither tool was blind accessible. Boo! I couldn’t do anything on my own, whilst my wife said that both tools had a simple to use user interface. Grrrr!

And when it came down to it, when we tried practicing with it, removing ‘Other’ (strings, guitar, synths) and bass, my wife’s opinion of the experience (we were acoustic guitar and bass), was that it was a diminished experience compared to just practicing with the original track off Spotify. And when I tried it again, with Moises playing vocals and drums, and I was on bass, it was only ok. But I found myself playing a lot softer and more tentative, as after all the music was coming out of my wife’s built-in speakers on her desktop computer,  so I had to hold myself back, so not being able to just let loose and play? I didn’t end up having as much fun as I usually do when rocking-out with Spotify, when the music is coming out of my Fender Rumble bass amp (phone plugged into the audio jack).

And when we sat down and listened to just the bass guitar parts, that also depressed me, as for the first time we could actually hear the original bass fills (no longer drowned out by everything else which goes on in a recording) and we heard how crazy the bass player was getting! And it just highlighted that I’d never be able to replicate what they were doing, as I just can’t move that fast all over the fretboard like a pro. Boo!

So, after managing to replicate what HymnBook can do, what is my end verdict on multi-tracks and being able to isolate individual parts of songs? I think the verdict is still out.

If I could use it on my own, I think I’d be all in now. While the moral aspect is another issue, we could easily sign-up to Hitpaw for a month, and convert hundreds and hundreds of songs from Spotify in that month and cancel after only ever spending $20. And even though I’m on a Spotify Premium account, so I am paying for music, that still feels pretty dodgy. While purchasing each song on iTunes for $1.99 each, after buying say 200 songs, you’d be down almost $400, which is also a pretty big upfront investment to make. While it was fantastic to hear each individual component of a song and completely geek out over it, and practicing with select instruments from the band was interesting, but I think the novelty would ware-off quite quickly, especially if the sound quality is not as good as what comes out of my bass amp. So yeah, maybe having multi-tracks of songs is good in theory, but in practice? Maybe not as useful in the real world. But yeah, if you want to test it out for yourself, just Google Hitpaw, and Moises- try your hand at being a Music Producer! Or a stand-in bass player for your favourite band!