Mooer takes on JBL with its own AI stem separation tech – and it could change the way you practice your favorite songs

Mooer Audio has just announced the next stage in its AI-driven revolution, with StemLab functionality arriving for its Future Series of Intelligent desktop guitar amps.

The new tech allows players to break down their favorite songs into isolated guitar, drum, bass guitar, vocals, all with one click on a smartphone.

If you’re the kind of player who wakes up in the morning, applies some nitrocellulose pomade to your quiff, plays a Nocaster but secretly thinks electric guitar peaked at the Rickenbacker Electro A-22 and has been “downhill ever since” then now might be a good time to look away.

This StemLab business is audio processing as some sort of crazy digital voodoo.

If you’re digitally minded and are reading this on your smartphone anyway, then this might just be the feature to make practice sessions more productive, more enjoyable.

Who else has wished they could mute Dave Mustaine with their smartphone while trying to master Marty Friedman’s knuckle-twisting Symphony of Destruction solo? Well, you could apparently do that with this.

If this technology sounds a little familiar that’s because it has A) been long teased and B) has arrived already, at least from one of Mooer Audio’s rivals in this AI-augmented guitar amp market, the JBL BandBox Trio.

It, too, allows you to split tracks down into their constituent elements and woodshed over, say, just the drum beat. In Matt McCracken’s Guitar World review of the JBL BandBox Trio, he said it was the best AI practice tool he had used, even if it wasn’t quite as good at separating the melodic instrumentation as it was the percussive.

“It does well, but it’s not perfect,” he wrote. “It’s great at removing the drums, because most of their information is transient rather than tonal, but it finds it hard to distinguish between melodic elements that occupy the same space.

“That means vocals, guitars, synths, and sometimes the bass can get taken out or occasionally pop back in when you’re not expecting… If you want to practice your guitar, however, it’s absolutely brilliant.”

The speed of guitar’s digital transformation is dizzying. To think that it all started out with amp modelers, digital effects, and now we’ve got smart guitars, smart amps, and emerging AI technologies that allow us to dial in a tone via prompts, or play a piece of music and have the tone. It feels like it was just yesterday that Mooer Audio gave us Smart Presets.

As for StemLab, there is one key difference to the JBL BandBox; you need the app to control it, whereas it is on-device with the JBL. But with Mooer Audio to roll this feature out across its Intelligent Amps, multi-effects pedals and Intelligent Guitars, perhaps it is only a matter of time before we see new hardware with this audio de-mixing feature integrated with the design.

As it is, though, this looks like another powerful tool, another step forward for digital technology and guitar. Players can use StemLab to split songs down into six tracks then independently control mix volumes for each.

The app supports A/B loop playback, making it easier to really workshop those phrases you just can’t get under the fingers, and you can de-mix these tracks then export the audio as a .wav file to practice to later.

StemLab is compatible with most popular audio file types (MP3, FLAC, WAV, ALAC, AAC, OGG, WMA). If you’ve got one of Mooer Audio’s Future Series Intelligent Amps, simply update the iAMP app.

For more details, head over to Mooer Audio.