In the nineties I used managing karaoke for friends: Not having much money, and doing that for friends in private parties, I collected from the web a huge number of free .mid and .kar file that I retrieved yesterday from an obsolete and still working CD-ROM
Well, I can say that CD in my PC rumbled as a bunch of rattlesnakes 
, and I spent dozens of minutes to transfer just 100 MB of files, so not well working indeed
Note: these files are mostly made by amateurs, so almost useless for musical production, but I think they can be useful to understand a bit the structure of certain famous songs, so be possibly able to replicate them in Scaler
BTW, among my old softwares I also retrieved Picasa that was a very simple but very good software to organize and edit shoots: so now my wife can practice PP a bit without getting mad, he he
And I also retrieved VanBasko, a free karaoke player that still works in Windows 8.1: Amazing considering that its development ceased in 2004 
Well, I quickly fed Scaler with some of those MIDIs but I found that Scaler doesnât recognize any karaoke file, likely because they contain multiple instruments, each one with its own chords
And here is my usual photostory 
When you drop a karaoke file in Ableton Live 11 (I donât know other DAWs) youâll have a series of MIDI tracks like below, and if you hit the Play button you hear nothing: this because karaoke files are MIDIs so they donât contain any sound
In the past Soundfonts were used, and it seems they are still used, but I am quite sure that our modern VSTs performs better
Now, if you are a Lucky Man they have names suggesting the intruments involved, but it was not the case here: there are 5 instruments and no one shows the instrument involved YUK!
Itâs the time to use one feature of VanBasko that lets you see the instrument names after you click on Play and BINGO: We know there are 2 guitars, a piano, a drums and a solo guitar
Wait, 5 instruments and a piano?
The band was just 4 people and there is no piano in their videos: it means the karaoke maker cheated LOL
Well, doesnât matter: the piano seemed fine to me so I kept it
Now the next step is finding the closer vst you have, and putting it next to its matching MIDI track, then you must move the MIDIs (colored rectangles with a green arrow) on the intrument track, and eventually you delete the MIDI track
And here is the picture after having renamed all 5 tracks
The next step is putting VanBasko in loop so you can understand the âsoundâ of each instrument trying to emulate it; for the solo distorted guitar I think I found a good sound just using one S-Gear preset, while for the other guitar, bass and drums I selected the proper sound by ear and using vintage presets
And now itâs time to collocate the instruments in the space, so I dropped a Relay tool on each track
Then I launched the Neutron Visual Mixer: this beast is amazing because lets you positioning precisely in the space, vertically (towards the public) and laterally, all instruments in a visual way
Below is the starting situation with all instruments at the center
And here is a 1st casual positioning, just for audting the result, but how knowing the real one?
I used my Woodstock DVD and I did a couple of screenhots to see their spatial placement
As you see the solo guitarist (and vocalist, but sorry if I donât even try to emulate him ) is on the left of the drummer, while the bassist and the acc guitarist are on the right, more or less on the same horizontal line
I checked other videos on YT and I found more or less the same situation, so now itâs time to translate this information in the Visual Mixer, and here is the result, with the Snapshot feature on top used to save the positioning in case some instrument are to be equalizedâŚ
While auditing indeed, I noticed the bass sound was too much faint, so I dropped a Neutron on it, and applied (by ear again) a revitalizing effect
At the end, I did the final mixing by ear, instead of using the usual Neutron My Assistant feature, and thatâs all
here is the spell result
