jpeg wrote:
my point is whats not to like about stems? not every feature has to be used by every person, so there is no reason to have the disdain towards stems.
sorry it took me so long to reply to you but i had a very hellish busy week.
well, i know what i'm about to say might sound like nuts to many of you but still i have my point of view on sound and technology, and having a fair amount of experience i think it might be valuable to share it. BEWARE THIS WILL BE LONG!
i think sound is a very powerful energy, sound and music have been used by humanity since the dawn of time for a number of purposes, religion and magic and power all have their roots in sound and music creation and manipulation. both rhythm, timbre and tonality are usable to create vibes, they are powerful and even dangerous tools, you can ignite or pacify a riot with the right sound. technology is inherent in music making again since the dawn of time, from slapping one's own thighs to banging rocks onto one another to more sophisticated tools like wrapping a cow skin on a piece of wood we always experimented with materials and engineering to bring on more and more powerful tools of sound\music creation and manipulation.
With the advent of sound reproducibility ( early 20th century first with the wax cylinder phonograph then with electricity proper, microphones, loudspeakers, then magnetic tape etc...) a new era dawned. the digital revolution of early 80's was another milestone.
now we are in a place where we have every tool imaginable and is all very accessible to almost everyone, it is kind of a Renaissance regarding sound,and it is a wonderful thing, but unluckily this goes hand in hand with a general degradation of sound culture and awareness, up to the point that almost nobody has a really decent music listening setup in their home anymore (even musicians\producers that usually rely only on their studio monitors and headphones, which are great WORK tools but aren't the good way to listen to music). pair it with the dematerialization of music, the disappearance of the physical medium in favour of ephemere streaming services and we can see that audio quality is something a lot of people is totally unaware of.
back to music technology: some of it is really seducing because of how useful it is, and we are often more than willing to compromise sound quality for features. i give you an example: ableton WARP and similar granular techniques that allow you to decouple tempo and pitch. we all use them, right? it seems absurd to choose to not use them, but if you have even a bare minimum of sonic quality awareness you notice that even the best algorithm is taking away a significant part of the audio quality, while changing tempo by slowing down or speeding up the actual recording (the old way) usually gives you a sound that retains its punch, its texture, its sonic characteristics (of course there are samplers that perform better and worse in this area too, but generally it sounds better). of course you have the inconvenient of pitch changes. but it is always an inconvenient? those techniques have spawned ENTIRE music genres! try to slow down an AMEN break with warp or similar stuff, you'll end up with something that a)doesn't sound like 90's hiphop at all and b)has some nasty artifacts or anyway loses a lot of its sound "magick". speed it up to 160 for some jungle action with warp and again, you dont sound jungle at all and it sounds pretty lame anyway. see what im saying? going with the limitations and working around them gave always rise to a sh1tload of new creative potential, wether the same you cannot say about a tool like warp. the only times when warp has given rise to something creatively new and inspiring is when it is used WRONGLY, exhaggerating its own sound artifacts to create something weird and fresh.
the reason why im absolutely not interested in stems is because it will dilute the raw sound even more (it generate very bad artifacts a lot of times and in general it takes away something from the power of sound) and also it will probably dumb down music producers too, making us lazier and lazier. but it is the first aspect that really scares me. sound is powerful, but we are losing the ability to "hear" when something sounds good and when not. another example: the famous octatrack sampler. there are pages and pages of users on various forums that say they have demonstrated SCIENTIFICALLY that the octatrack sounds good like any other high quality sampler. well, it doesn't to my trained ears , it always sounded DULL and lifeless, no matter what i tried, that's why i sold it even if it was a very powerful tool feature-wise. similar thing can be said about current line mpcs, but luckily they dont sound dull and lifeless as the octatrack imho, here the difference is very subtle: tech specs wise, they sound much better than the mpc 1000 im comparing my live mk1 to. the 1k sounds rougher and not so pristine, while the live mk1 sounds crystal clear. but there is something that makes me prefer the sound of the 1k, it is difficult to describe with adjectives, but it has something to do with how powerful, compact, textured the samples sound. if i bring the 950 to the table its another dimension again, less clear sound but oh boy, does it sound good! and transposing samples up and down is a joy with the 950 wether on the 1000 it really sounds pretty bad, and on the live it sounds "meh" at best, not bad but not good either. so you see, i'm interested in something that is not describable in terms of features or tech specs, but it has everything to do with profound perception, how the sounds make you feel, how powerful they tend to come out of the speakers, almost sculpting physical matter around them. last example: i have a simple fostex r8 reel to reel 1/4" 8 tracks recorder and a motu ultralite. i can record 8 tracks (the 8 submixes of my desk) to both at the same time. when i record on the motu (48 or 96 khz 24 bit) the sound is pristine but always a bit lifeless compared to how the instruments sound directly from mixer to speakers. when i record on tape, i have to be careful not saturate too much or else it will sound like shite, but if i set levels correctly i have the SAME perception as when monitoring the instruments directly. it rolls off a bit of very high frequencies of course, so tech-specs wise it is worse than my motu, but sonic power awareness wise, it is much much better.
i would love to see akai pushing boundaries of features while still researching ways to make those machines sound glorious as in the early 90's, that's my point. you want stems? no problem on my side, but i want powerful sounding instruments above all, not stuff that does everything but looses focus on sound more and more.
i know what i've said is long and will not make sense to a lot of you, but someone perhaps will understand what i'm about.
peace.
