Dual-channel Drum Separation for Low-cost Drum Recording Using Non-negative Matrix Factorization

Recording drum performance is more complicated than recording other music performance because a drum set contains multiple classes of percussive instruments each of which cannot be recorded individually. In this work, we consider a low-cost drum recording setup, which adopts dual-channel source sep-aration techniques based on the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and non-negative matrix factor deconvolution (NMFD) techniques to reconstruct the eight percussive instrument tracks from recordings with only two overhead microphones. Compared to previous drum separation works which only separate bass drum, snare drum and hi-hat, this work firstly considers the separation of tom drums and cymbals, which is a technically challenging task. A pipeline for imitating the panning of each instrument of a target recording is also designed. Results of source separation and panning imitation demonstrate the potential of the proposed method on low-cost drum recording.