My new venture, Stems.cc, is taking its first humble steps. It is a site built around collaborative music making and remixing. A site that encourages openness in an industry plagued with protectiveness and copyrights. Because of the nature of Stems, all songs must be released under Creative Commons license. By the way, a stem, in musical vocabulary, is a group of instruments.

Anything dealing with music, other than listening to it, has challenges. Compared to a visual medium, music is a bit more niche activity. Everyone enjoys music, but there are less people who make music than people who draw or take photos. You can casually draw a doodle or take a photo, but it’s not as easy for anyone to just make music. Also, the file sizes when dealing with music are exponentially bigger; one minute of uncompressed audio is over 10 megabytes. The speeds of Internet connections and the cost of hosting has become more feasible to deal with large files, but it is still a pain to upload 100 megabytes of data that a song in stems form usually takes, though. Despite these challenges, I hope I’ll be able to build some kind of a community.

When developing Stems, 4chan founder Christopher Poole’s new site canv.as and their use of exploitables has been one source of inspiration. Someone posts a picture as a template and the community goes on wild and unpredictable tangents, like demonstrated with this blank-faced Charlie Brown. The aim of Stems is to provide something similar to this, but hopefully in a bit more professional manner.

There are three basic use cases I’ve envisioned:

1. Someone posts the stems to their completed song and allows the community to remix it or make songs inspired by some of its elements.
2. Someone posts a single stem, e.g. a guitar track on which the community collaboratively expands upon. One user adds a drum track, other sings some vocals and so on.
3. Someone posts a few random samples or found sounds and says “Make a track out of these sounds”

I hope to keep Stems as flexible a platform as possible, so the community can easily come up with different ways to use it. Maybe even calling the threads “songs” is a mistake when considering scenario 3.

My previous venture Chains.cc has currently a bit over 2500 users around the world and an iOS app is slowly under works, which will hopefully introduce Chains to a new crowd.

It’s been ages since the last update, but here’s a new song to make up for it.

I was playing around in dropped-D tuning and the basic tune came out pretty painlessly. I also play an irish tin flute in the interludes. Semira sings beautifully as always and I’m really happy with the outcome.

Last night, I released the first version of my new app, Chain. It’s a motivational tool based on a method by Jerry Seinfeld. It motivates you to do things you want to do daily, e.g. “Read book” or “Do stretches”. Each day you do something, you mark it in Chain and after a while you have so many days in a row that you care more about breaking the chain than doing the actual task.

Chain is very much in the development stage and will evolve rapidly.

It shares accounts with my previous app, Todo, so if you signed up for it, your login works with both apps. You can find it at siirre.com/chain.

“Your only job next is to not break the chain,” as Jerry says. “Don’t break the chain.”

Photographer Nina Merikallio was featured in the latest issue of 125 Magazine and she also did a short film for them. She wanted to use one of my songs for the music and I was happy to make a special edit of the track. Check it out. Like our Läkerol film posted before, this was also shot in Lithuania. They have a lot of interesting locations there.

The official post about the film can be found here. And below is the original song.