With Hit’n’Mix’s audio tools offering repair and stem separation among other things, a recent addition to their RipX platform brings some musical transcription tricks as well. We check out its musical ear for guitarists when the tab or music is missing.

Overview Of RipX

Established in 2009, the team at Hit’n’Mix can lay claim to some of the longest-established stem separation technology on the market. The company’s knowhow can currently be found in its RipX platform, which comes in three module flavours that zero-in on specific audio surgery and creative tasks.

DeepAudio, described as the platform’s “sound surgeon” covers separation, cleanup, and repair, with forensic levels of audio editing available. DeepRemix brings an emphasis on the stem separation for which the company is perhaps best known, for practice and remixing.

The third, and most recent module addition for RipX is DeepCreate. This leans on the tech behind both of its siblings to combine both surgery and stem separation. However DeepCreate’s main purpose is to provide an alternative to the conventional DAW for realising ideas and whole productions.

Who Needs Chords?

Some reading this will be familiar with the need sometimes to engage in a game of ‘Hunt The Chord’. This can crop up in a number of scenarios. In the studio, it could be an artist using an existing track for inspiration or reference. For practice, pre-production, or just out of intrigue, players may wish to simply play along to existing music. In both cases, the chords used can be guessed or worked out by ear if possible, but tools exists that can listen and report the chords.

In the video we use RipX DeepCreate to pull out and transcribe chords from a premixed track. Using its stem separation, we first strip out a mix into its individual elements to hear the guitar tracks in isolation. With the guitar layer solo’d we show how detected chords can be used to cue a new performance or even show inverted or capo’d voicings.

Although some of the detected chords look complicated, the detected notes are accurate. This can happen with things such as inverted chords where RipX detects a 6th instead of a minor 1st inversion, for example. Users can then edit the notes by clicking to hear them and deleting if necessary.

With stem separation and pitch recognition and editing all in the same place, we’re struggling to think of any other platform that can do it natively like RipX can.

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