Part-Dominant Practice Tracks: Buy Them or Make Your Own?

Every choir director hits the same wall. The anthem changes weekly, half the section reads music slowly, and rehearsal keeps going to note-drilling instead of singing. The fix has been the same for thirty years: give each singer a part-dominant practice track — their own line pushed forward, the other three voices kept underneath as a reference.

You can buy those tracks, or you can make them from a recording. Most advice online picks a side. The honest answer is that both are right, and which one applies depends on a single question: does a publisher actually sell tracks for the arrangement your choir is singing this month?

What a part-dominant track actually is

A part-dominant track (also sold as part-predominant) is not an isolated voice. That distinction matters, and it is where most DIY attempts go wrong.

• One part forward. The target voice sits noticeably louder than the rest — enough that a singer can follow it without straining.
• The other parts still audible. They stay quiet but present, so the singer keeps their pitch reference and hears how their line fits against the harmony.
• Accompaniment included when the piece is not a cappella, so entries and tempo stay anchored.

Hand a singer a fully isolated part with nothing else and they learn the notes but not the piece. They arrive at rehearsal able to sing their line alone and unable to hold it against the other three. That is why the commercial category settled on part-dominant rather than solo tracks, and why any track you build yourself should keep the other voices in the mix at low level.

Why published packs cost $25–40 per arrangement

The price is not arbitrary. A published rehearsal pack for a single SATB octavo typically runs $25–40 for a multi-user licence, and you are paying for three real things:

• Professional singers, recorded part by part. Each voice was tracked separately, so there is zero bleed between parts. No separation tool can match a source that was never mixed together.
• A distribution licence. The multi-user pack explicitly permits sharing with the members of your own choir. That is the piece people forget they are buying.
• Consistency. Diction, dynamics, and style are modelled correctly, which is genuinely useful for a choir with mixed reading ability.

The repertoire nobody sells tracks for

Here is the part that rarely gets said plainly: publishers only sell rehearsal tracks for arrangements in their own catalogue. That is a small slice of what choirs actually sing. If your programme includes any of the following, there is no pack to buy at any price:

• A public-domain motet or mass movement — Palestrina, Tallis, Byrd, Victoria, Bach. Centuries of core choral repertoire, no rehearsal-track market.
• An out-of-print octavo still sitting in your library folders.
• An arrangement your own director wrote, or one commissioned from a local composer.
• A hymn with a descant your organist added last year.
• Repertoire in a language or tradition the big publishers do not cover.
• A piece your choir already recorded at last year's concert and wants to relearn.

In every one of those cases the choice is not "buy or separate". It is "separate, or spend an evening at the piano recording four parts yourself". That is the real comparison, and it is why separation gets reached for even by directors who happily buy licensed packs when they exist.

There is a second scenario worth naming: the score exists, but nobody has time to enter it. Typing an SATB octavo into notation software to export per-part audio is an hour of work per piece. Separating a reference recording takes a couple of minutes. When the anthem changes every week, that difference decides whether the tracks get made at all.

How to make a part-dominant track from a recording

1. Start from the cleanest source you have. A cappella recordings separate best because nothing instrumental competes with the voices. A dry rehearsal recording often beats a reverberant concert recording.
2. Upload it and run SATB Choir mode. You get four stems back — soprano, alto, tenor, bass — each as its own file.
3. Build one mix per part. Put the target voice at full level and the other three around 20–30% underneath. That ratio is what makes it a part-dominant track rather than a solo line.
4. Export four files and label them clearly. "Anthem — Alto dominant" saves you a dozen emails from singers who downloaded the wrong one.
5. Send them out with the tempo you want. If the recording is faster than your rehearsal tempo, say so, or slow the file down before sending.

Any free audio editor handles step three. You are only setting four faders and exporting; there is no mixing skill required.

What it actually costs

Separation on MusiCraft is billed per minute of audio, so a typical anthem is small. SATB Choir mode charges 5 credits per minute, which puts a three-minute piece at 15 credits.

On Basic that works out near $0.50 per anthem if you use the full monthly allowance, against $25–40 for a licensed pack. The gap is real, but read the licensing section before treating it as a like-for-like swap — you are buying separation, not a distribution licence.

Where separation struggles

Separation reconstructs four voices from a single mixed signal, so it has limits a part-by-part studio recording does not. Knowing them up front saves you from blaming the tool for a hard source:

• Divisi on close intervals. Soprano 1 and 2 a third apart will partly merge. The model separates by voice range, not by what is written on the page.
• Adjacent parts in the same register. Alto and tenor bleed into each other more than soprano and bass do. Once the target part is pushed forward for practice, this is usually inaudible.
• Unison and homophonic passages. When all four parts move together on the same rhythm, there is less for the model to pull apart.
• Heavy room reverb. A cathedral recording carries the tail of every voice into every other part. Drier sources separate better.
• Dense orchestral choral works. A full Requiem with orchestra behind the choir is the hardest case in the category.

For the everyday job — a four-part anthem, a hymn setting, a gospel chorus, a barbershop chart — none of these are blocking. They matter when you are trying to notate an exact inner voice, not when a second alto wants to learn her line by Thursday.

What you can hand to your singers

This is the part worth being careful about, because separation does not create new rights. The stems inherit whatever covers the recording you started from. Separating a commercial CD does not give you the distribution licence that a multi-user rehearsal pack includes.

The clean cases, where you are on solid ground:

• Recordings your choir made. Your own rehearsal tapes and concert recordings, where the ensemble and the venue are yours.
• Public-domain compositions with a freely licensed recording — Creative Commons or public-domain performances of Renaissance and Baroque repertoire.
• Arrangements you own, including anything your director wrote or your group commissioned.
• Recordings you already hold a licence for that permits internal rehearsal copies.

Where the source is an in-copyright commercial recording and you want to send files to forty members, buying the licensed pack is both simpler and safer. If you are unsure, your denomination or choral association usually has guidance on rehearsal copies, and it is a faster answer than guessing.

Common questions

Can I use a recording I found online?

Technically the separation will run on any audio file you can upload. Rights-wise, a random upload carries the same copyright as the release it came from, and often an unclear one on top. For distribution to your choir, prefer a source whose terms you can actually check.

My choir is SSA or TTBB, not SATB. Does this still work?

SATB mode separates by the four standard voice ranges, so it maps directly onto SATB and SAB scores. Women's choir (SSA) and men's chorus (TTBB) recordings separate by range rather than by written part — you will still get usable stems, but the mapping to "Soprano 2" or "Bass 1" is not one-to-one. Run the separation and solo whichever stem carries the line you need.

Is MP3 good enough for practice tracks?

Yes. Practice tracks get played on phones, car speakers, and cheap earbuds. MP3 stems are available from Basic upward and are entirely sufficient. WAV output, on Studio and above, matters when you are re-mixing a recording for release rather than making rehearsal audio.

What if we have a recording but no sheet music at all?

That is separation's strongest case — no notation software can help you, because there is nothing to enter. Solo one voice at a time to notate the arrangement line by line, and check the intervals against the other stems as you go.