Hi everyone!
I’m a bluegrass enthusiast from Japan, and I also enjoy programming as a hobby. I’ve been working on a project called OtoWake BG, and the moderators kindly gave me permission to share it here.
The idea is simple: What if you could take your favorite bluegrass recording and play along as if you were part of the band?
OtoWake BG is designed to separate bluegrass recordings into individual parts — banjo, mandolin, fiddle, dobro, guitar, bass, and vocals.
This opens up two ways to use your favorite recordings:
1. Isolate an instrument to learn from it
Want to figure out a banjo break, a mandolin solo, or a fiddle lick? Listen to that instrument on its own, slow it down, and loop tricky passages to learn by ear.
2. Mute your instrument and join the band
Want to practice your own banjo, mandolin, guitar, fiddle, dobro, or bass playing? Mute that instrument in the recording and play along with the rest of the band.
You can practice backup, work on your breaks, or just enjoy jamming with some of your favorite bluegrass musicians — even when you don’t have other players around.
My plan is to make OtoWake BG available for free once it’s ready. This is a personal hobby project, and I’d love for other bluegrass musicians to be able to enjoy it too.
I’ve recently started sharing the development journey on Substack, including real audio examples showing what the separation sounds like:
Listen to the audio separation examples:
Splitting a Bluegrass Band into Every Instrument: “Going Down the Road”
Here’s where I could really use some help from the bluegrass community.
I’m primarily a guitar player, but I actually bought a mandolin specifically for this project so I could record some training material myself.
However, to build a complete bluegrass instrument separation model, I would also need a banjo, dobro, fiddle, and upright bass. Buying all those instruments would be expensive, of course, but the much bigger challenge would be the enormous amount of time it would take to learn to play each one well enough to make useful recordings!
That’s why I’m looking for bluegrass musicians who might be willing to contribute recordings to help train the model. Recordings with isolated instrument tracks would be especially helpful, as long as the necessary permissions are available.
In return, I’d be happy to try separating recordings from your own band so you can hear the individual parts.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Would you find this more useful for learning breaks, practicing backup, or jamming along with your favorite recordings?
Thanks for reading, and happy picking!
P.S. I’m a native Japanese speaker, and I used translation tools to help write this post in English. I hope it reads naturally, and I appreciate your understanding!
