Should we separate drums before changing key?

SongSelect is adding key and tempo control to lyric videos. Pitch-shifting a drum kit smears its transients, so Rehearse already routes drums around the pitch shifter. Lyric-video tracks that start life as a stereo master can't do that today — their instrument bed has drums baked in, so everything gets shifted together.

This page plays the same song two ways at the same moment so you can decide whether the difference justifies adding a music.ai drum-separation step to every one of these tracks.

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Rehearse's range. Start at 0 — both arms should sound the same there. Anything you hear as you move away from 0 is the drum bypass.

1.00×
0.75×1.00×1.25×

Tempo is pitch-compensated on every stem, drums included — that part is unavoidable and identical in both arms.

0:00 / 0:00
Judging transient smear needs the same few bars repeatedly.

Stems

Solo Drums and push the key slider — that is the clearest way to hear what shifting a kit does. Greyed stems are silent in the current arm.

StemArmRoutingMuteSolo
What to listen for
  • Cymbals and hi-hats — shifting smears them into a wash; the bypassed arm keeps them crisp.
  • Snare crack — the initial transient softens and the body of the drum changes character.
  • Kick definition — downward shifts make it flabby, upward shifts make it clicky.
  • Cost of the bypass — drums stay at concert pitch while the bed moves. On tracks with tuned percussion or heavy cymbal bleed, that can itself sound wrong. Worth judging honestly.
Technical verification

Both arms must pass through the same total latency, or drums would sit off-time and read as bad separation. These are the measured numbers from this browser.