Jesse G
sharke
To get a clean drum track from a full mix would be like trying to get the toothpaste back in the tube.






ooohh boy he made my day!!
I like the description that I've given to others, it's like making a cake with flour, sugar, eggs, milk, oil, vanilla, baking powder, mixing it all together, baking it and removing the cake from the pan, then asking to remove the eggs from the cake.
Given all that, there's a science and art to this 'unmixing' that folks who do remixing/mashups are pretty adept at. First, as others have mentioned, see if there's a intro, outro, dub, remix version, acapella, bootleg, or even MIDI that might have the song elements you're looking for in isolation. If you can get this, this is the way to go.
If not, then you have some tools and tricks to try. If it's vocals, you can try phase-inversion tricks to either pull out vocals or attempt to remove them. If it's other things, then you can get spectral-analysis software to help you out here. If you have the version of Sonar with R-Mix, or got lucky with one of the closeout version of the full R-Mix, give that a try. Also, I hear good things about IZotope's RX-2, I'll have to trial that and see how well it works on a project I'm trying. Also, you can use EQ and filtering to better isolate frequencies, then use something like Audiosnap or Drum replacer and then at least get the groove and replace with similar-sounding samples.
Of course, it will not be perfect. But it may be just good enough. I know as I'm doing remixes/mashups, since other things get layered over it, it's not too bad, and actually, it can even add kind of a low-fi gritty edge to the mix.