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.

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.

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

This turned out to be a good decision, as the rubato tempo creates an interesting effect with the electronic elements. Usually electronic music has a fixed tempo, so the changing rhythm sounds unexpected and new. In fact, I think I liked it too much, because the beginning drags on a bit too long, maybe. No matter, it’s still pretty good, and this will probably be a technique I will study further.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi9VwSq-vbo

Also spent a weekend in Germany at Melt! festival.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKWTNhXRv4k

Below, for your enjoyment, are the complete tracks.

Below, some screenshots of the various software in question.

Scream Tracker 2.2

Scream Tracker 3.21

Fast Tracker 2

Songs after the break.

First, some four channel chip MODs. The original MOD-files are in the range of 4-20KB:

Then some Fast Tracker 2 XM tracks:

In the midst of all the hate-filled comments at t61′s Facebook page, I noticed a link to uvumi.com. It seems to have a lot in common with the old t61. Like the old t61, Uvumi continues to play songs even when you navigate around the site, which is nice, and I don’t understand why t61 removed that feature as well. Creating your profile and uploading songs was a really pleasant experience as the interface has loads of polished AJAX details.

One thing I disagree with, in both uvumi and the new t61, is that you have to click a link to see a band’s songs. I consider the songs to be primary content, and profile information secondary. Let the songs speak for themselves.

Oh, and almost forgot to link to my uvumi page.