Looking for Stems? Check out this site!
Whenever I go to a conference, I always pick up a few new sites or tools from attending sessions. This past week at APME in Memphis, I found quite a few. Perhaps my favorite is a site where you can find HUNDREDS of songs that are available to download as stems. Stems are the individual tracks that make up a complete song. While there are now lots of AI-powered software tools that allow you to break down a song into individual stems (check out my post on Moises - my personal favorite tool), the owners of those copyrights aren’t all too thrilled about you doing that. Enter the Cambridge Music Technology website - specifically a page that is dedicated to a book called Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio by Mike Senior. It contains 625 projects - all with downloadable copyright-free stems. If you are working with students who are interested in digital music production and remixing, this is the PERFECT site to find great content for them to work with.
The 625 projects are broken down into musical genres, including Acoustic, Jazz, Country, EDM, Rock, and more. Each category has lots of great examples of projects that include both downloadable multitracks (stems) as well as the final mix of that song. By clicking on any of the links to the stems, you’ll get a folder of tracks that you can then import into your favorite DAW, including Soundtrap, YuStudio, and any of the other locally installed options like Logic, Ableton, and GarageBand. It is important to note that if your students are using Chromebooks or mobile devices, the transmission of these files to them might be a challenge - especially due to the large size of many of the files. There are ways to download them on your own device, and then post them to a Google Drive or Dropbox for them to access. Here’s a helpful article on how to do that.
The only issue that I can see with using the tracks from this site is that the students won’t actually know almost any of the tracks that are available. They are all from relatively unknown bands and artists. In fact, these musicians have posted these tracks here for you to experiment with and all they ask in return is that you consider supporting them with a donation or by liking and subscribing to them on sites like Spotify and Apple Music. As an example, I randomly chose a track from the Electronica genre by artist Ian Dearden called Terania Creek Walking. You can preview an excerpt of the track, and either download the stems or listen to the final mix. This is what that entry looks like:
I decided to then download the stems, and when it was complete, this is what that folder looked like on my local hard drive:
I then opened up Soundtrap and clicked on the Import Audio button. I selected all of the tracks in the folder (except for the Read Me file) and then this is what that looked like:
Super easy! There are countless ways to use stems like these with your students. You can come up with some pretty creative projects that allow students to become audio engineers, producers, and remixers. Have them rearrange and re-orchestrate the tracks. Have them re-record the vocals or any of the instrumental tracks. Give them all the same stems and then ask them to reimagine the song and create their own version. See how different they all turn out!
A BIG thank you to Cambridge Music Tech and Mike Senior for making all these multitrack recordings available. I highly recommend checking out the site and using these tracks with your students. Yes they can use hit songs, but these tracks are all safe and copyright friendly. Enjoy!