Because of the confidence this gives you, you find yourself not feeling the need to really “plan” ahead an idea comes to you “in the mix”, and you can do it spontaneously. (You can of course turn off all the other elements, but they’re still “looping” in the background.)Īnd if you do get “out of your depth”, by simple disengaging the master effect, returning all filters to 12 o’clock, and pushing the four faders for the deck to maximum, you’re back with the full, unaltered stereo mix. This keeps it simple enough to understand at all times. You simply can’t, for instance, decide to loop just the bassline, or just the vocal, like you can in Remix Decks when it comes to where you actually are in a track, it’s one place and one place alone. Ultimately, I think the reason for that is that temporally, the tracks play as they were intended. But here’s the important thing: It never becomes overwhelming. When you start combining ideas like the above with loops, cues and so on, and it becomes extremely addictive. Being able to individually turn off/on, filter and add FX to four parts of a track opens up a whole – and highly addictive – new way of DJing. If you want to extend the length of a mix over minutes not seconds, it’s suddenly simple to swap the beats over while leaving the rest of a song playing, so when you finally switch melody from one to the next, the beat has already “won over” your crowd. Get a couple of songs in compatible keys, and the same goes for basslines or vocals. It is ridiculously easy to swap the beat from one song for that from another, for instance. The fun really starts, though, when you are mixing with a bunch of Stems files. Want an instant dub mix? Then you can add a long post-fade echo to a vocal, strip the track back to drums and bassline, and flick in the odd word or sentence from the full song – done! You can get instant acapellas, instant instrumentals, and so on. So from a creative point of view, they’re great fun right from the off. The first impression is, basically, that a child could work out how these work in seconds… and to us, that’s exactly the kind of thing you want when DJing. So to set up, you just plug a controller that works with Stems (currently, the Traktor Kontrol S8, Traktor Kontrol D2, and Traktor Kontrol F1) into a laptop running the new Traktor 2.9, load a Stems file onto a deck, and move the four faders for that deck to control the volumes. The file appear just like normal music files, and even when loaded onto hardware/software that can play them properly, everything is pretty much immediately intuitive. While Remix Decks are certainly powerful and interesting, we ultimately found them unintuitive and over-complicated, with large preparation involved and a lot of concentration while DJing not to mess your performance up.įrankly, Stems couldn’t be more different. When we first heard about Stems, we were excited in a way which truth be told we struggled to be with Remix Decks, the last attempt at changing how DJs play from Native Instruments. The clear desire is that it will be adopted by the wider community and become an accepted and established new file format. It’s also important to note that this is an open-source platform, meaning Native Instruments is giving it free to any software or hardware makers who wish to use it: There’s no licensing or restrictions on it. Look out for the logo: NI is hoping this format will become as ubiquitous as the MP3.Īt launch, Native Instruments has promised hundreds of files available from many labels across a whole host of online retailers, but clearly the hope is that when the Stems Creator Tool becomes available later this summer, that number will swell as producers big and small start mixing their tracks down into this format for DJs to use. It’s only when you load a Stems file into compatible DJ software / hardware that it becomes more than a “normal” music file. That means that Stems files behave just like MP3s, in that you can download, audition, play and transfer them among all your devices, and play them back just like you would any other music file (assuming your devices can play MP4, which most modern music software and hardware can). As well as each of the four separate parts of the track, it also contains a full stereo mix. While Stems officially launches today, we’ve been playing with the hardware and software for a few weeks, and so today offer you a full and complete review, including two talkthrough videos. The DJ can adjust the volumes of each part individually, and apply filters and FX too. With compatible DJ hardware and software, Stems files give the user independent control over four parts of a track (for instance drums, bass, synth and vocal). Stems is an audio file format developed by Native Instruments for DJs.
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