The era of artists regularly releasing stems for remixing seems imminent. In the meantime, we see occasional examples of artists who get it. Radiohead have a new feature on their tune Nude, promoted with Apple. Purchase stems of a song (that’s by stem, so you pay US$0.99 * 5 stems + 1 full song if you want everything), and you get audio via iTunes Plus. Purchase the full set, and you can also download a GarageBand / Logic Pro-compatible project with all loop, tempo, and key information embedded, as pictured at top. (Unless I’m mistaken, that’s also the ideal way to get uncompressed audio for use in other tools.)

If you happen to prefer another tool for remixing (say, one that rhymes with Mabledon Dive and is often seen running on computers from Apple), these are just DRM-free audio files, so the choice is yours. Upload the finished results to the Web, and the band will review submissions and open them to votes. There are already a number of remixes up at the moment.

NUDE RE/MIX on iTunes

Radiohead Remix Site

Hmmm, nude remixing? Brings new meaning to “bedroom producer.” Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Radiohead does specify that you can’t use these for commercial purposes; it’s too bad they didn’t choose to apply a Creative Commons non-commercial license, which would formalize essentially what they’re saying. But this is otherwise done quite nicely, nonetheless, and I hope we see more of this.

Like remixable music? Nine Inch Nails has a whole remix site, and indie label Magnatune lets you remix all their artists’ work via a Creative Commons license (though they typically don’t offer stems). Online music outlet Dance Tracks Digital goes beyond stems with full Ableton Live-ready projects, suitable for DJs. That’s just for starters; if you have other favorite remix resources, let us know.

Karate Kid AV Remix from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

A major highlight of the party CDM held last weekend with our friends at TRASH_AUDIO and VJKungFu.tv: a live remix of The Karate Kid. Momo the Monster mangled the video while Shane Hazelton and Stephan Vankov did music. The whole event was powered by some clever MIDI sync that managed to wrangle the gear — enough hardware that it seemed like the crew had just raided a Guitar Center — and sync up the video.

Sure, the remix may sound silly — and it was. (Deliciously so.) But the interplay between the three, punctuated by ridiculous live vocals by Shane, really put it over the top. Adding some MIDI intelligence to your digital trio could help all kinds of performances, not just this one We’ll have to get Momo to share what he did.

Momo has more over on Create Digital Motion, complete with technical details:

Karate Kid AV Remix

But this clip should give you an idea of just how live the vocals were — in a moment that captures, shall we say, the brutish masculine power of the film:

Karate Kid live remixing music performance from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

CDM World Tour: catch up with Mike and Liz in Chicago, and Peter and Jaymis in Perth and Brisbane (Australia)!

Dorkbot Chicago

Any CDM-ers in the Chicagoland area are most warmly invited to this months Dorkbot at Deadtech, 3321 W. Fullerton Ave., on Wednesday at 8pm for food, drink, and brain-swelling information regarding micro-sampling and alternative musical controllers like QWERTY keyboards, game joysticks, and bicycles.

This week’s presenters will be Liz McLean-Knight and Michael Una, contributors to CDM.

See you there!

ByteMe, Perth; CDM Me, Brisbane

Australia is CDM’s second home, land of crazy creative contributors and designers, and birthplace of the CDM logo and graphic identity. And now I get to go there.

First up is an epic visualist festival in Perth, 11/30 - 12/9. (Jaymis and I arrive 12/2.)

ByteMe Festival

Okay, odds are, you aren’t anywhere near Perth, as it’s supposedly the most isolated city on the face of the Earth. But on the off chance that you are in/near Perth, you’ll definitely want to come out for this one. Visualists like Artificial Eyes and Jean Poole, not to mention festival organizers VJZoo, join a convergence of visual artists from game development to experimental film and motion graphics and special effects. I’m on a panel Wednesday night, but mostly Jaymis and I will be hanging around covering the festival and chatting with cool people. And we get to see whether our first in-person meetup creates a geek matter-antimatter temporal singularity.

12/10 - 12/14 we return to Brisbane, and odds are far likelier that you live there. There’s talk of doing some kind of music event in Brisbane. If you’re interested in helping us organize even a casual meet-up, Brisbanites, let me know. -PK

My friend Francis Preve has been working on Live 7 through its development, but he’s finally gotten a break long enough to talk about what’s new in this version:

Ableton Live 7 - sneak preview [Beatportal]

Being close to the development, what Fran says has some weight. The preview runs through the features one by one, as you’ve seen before. But there’s good reason Slice to MIDI is right on top.

With a single right-click on any loop in Live, you can automagically slice it into dozens of smaller segments — like individual kicks, snares and percussion — then import these slices into a Drum Rack, which is then played by its own unique MIDI sequence.

The sequences can then be reordered so that you can create entirely new grooves from a single drum loop.

It’s a huge feature. Slicing in this fashion is nothing new, particularly on beat workstation hardware. Doing it this easily — that’s new. On the record, Francis says “Fortunately, it’s so flexible that many producers will approach this tool from their own unique perspective.” And I believe that, yes; I’ve seen other features of Live warped (excuse the pun) to extremes by experimental Live users.

I like how Fran described this feature yesterday over IM, though: “Slice to MIDI will be the drop shadow of 2008.”

Hey, someone has to record this stuff for posterity. I’m working with the Live beta now, and it’s just getting to the point where I think it’s hands-on preview time, so stay tuned. See our previous preview:

Ableton Live 7, Ableton Live Suite: Quick Look at What’s New (and 90-odd comments from you good folks!)

Some were disappointed that the Segway was not, as promised, “an invention that will “sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking.’” But there’s hope, in the form of Brisbane, Australia-based electronic duo Segue’s vision for the future. Clearly, the first Segway was just a 1.0 device. What it needs is additional accessories to make it the globe-shifting device it should have been. It needs a beer fridge, Ableton Live sync, and Monome control.

Okay, backing up to the “real” Segue, Segue is the combination of Leo Hede and Dave Dri. They regularly team up with visualist Jaymis Loveday, a big force behind CDM and co-editor of Create Digital Motion. Sadly, for now, their rig is not built out of tricked-out Segways, though I’m hopeful for the future:

With two laptops, synths, MPC sampler, MIDI controllers and FX units all triggered live on stage, Segue are willing to walk the tightrope in the live arena where some contemporaries baulk at performing without a safety net. “It’s the eternal and much argued balance between risk and self indulgence” Dri says wryly, and reaction to their sets so far suggests the risk is paying off big time. Leo is more abrupt with his explanation of the extent of their stage setup, stating with a characteristic smile “this is what we enjoy, so this is how we play”.

If you’re interested in their music, here’s some additional background:

Segue’s Chemical Brothers remix featured on Palms Out Sounds [at AU dance site inthemix.com.au]
Chemical Brothers - EBW9 Segue remix [seguesound.com]
About Segue

And if you’re in Melbourne, go check out Segue + CDM’s own VJ Jaymis at Smashbang lounge on October 5 — erm, 5 October.

But I dare someone out there to do something as outlandish as the sketch above.

Sampling and remix culture is the future, right? Not if you ask a lot of music lovers at the moment. The guest for the CDM Random Rant of the Week is our friend Liz. It’s an issue I suspect has troubled some readers here, especially as music technology is equated to the sample/remix culture (especially if you believe Wired Magazine and we’re in the age of mash-ups.) Sure, tracks sampling other tracks is nothing new, but the legal battles over hip-hop aside, is there a backlash brewing? Do people want to hear something original, after all? And can Kanye, erm, speak truth to power with both the President of the United States and mysterious French electro duos? -PK

…Do[es] anybody make real shit anymore?
Bow in the presence of greatness
Cause right now thou has forsaken us
You should be honored by my lateness
That I would even show up to this fake shit
So go ahead, go nuts, go ape-shit
Especially on my best stand, on my Bape shit
Act like you can’t tell who made this…

“Stronger,” ft. substantial elements of Daft Punk’s “Harder Better Faster Stronger”

Before I clicked on the link I’m about to share with you, I was a hardcore, devil-fist-throwing Daft Punk mega-fan. After the link jump at the end, I had to reluctantly join the melancholy ranks of jaded music fans who’ve seen through the hype to the source, eventually admitting that what I had admired was blatant plagiarism.

Splice, a site for remixing songs, can now do something no Web browser app has successfully done before: pass for a dedicated audio app.

It’s no [Pro Tools, Ableton Live, SONAR, insert app here], but Splice’s online editor is a basic, functional audio sequencer with real-time arrangement, instruments, sync, and audio effects, all built in Adobe Flash CS3 / ActionScript 3. Sure, Flash has been able to do basic audio playback and mixing for some time. But Splice actually does things that dedicated audio applications normally do exclusively, such as sophisticated audio effects. There’s still quite a lot it doesn’t do, and since many of those things (live multitrack audio recording, hardware connections, and so on) aren’t currently possible in the browser, Web apps are unlikely to usurp dedicated music creation software any time in the forseeable future. But maybe that’s not the point: musicians can keep using the tools they love for music creation, then throw up a track and let a friend mash-up a new beat, or let fans create remixes. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine dedicated apps having similar online counterparts, or hooking seamlessly into such services.

And it’s what Splice does on the Web that makes it interesting. Not only are the tracks actively remixable, even by a casual listener new to the software who just wants to mess around, but sound sources are shared, too. You can pull up open freely-licensed samples from the Freesound Project, a collaborative database of sounds recorded around the world.

Little wonder then, that the lead developer of the new Splice has already made a name founding the sample project and sharing unusual software plug-ins (the traditional, offline type) for free. Bram de Jong, CTO and lead developer of the new Splice, is known to plug-in devotees for his involvement in Smartelectronix, a collective of developers releasing powerful and sometimes downright bizarre plugs for free. I got to talk to Bram about his new day job. He shares what Splice is about, what people are using it for, and how the heck they got Flash doing real audio.

It’s not Ableton Live by any stretch of the imagination, but Verizon has commissioned an interactive app built in Adobe Flash that lets you remix the sound of some top beatboxers. Featuring samples from Antoinette “Butterscotch” Clinton (international female beatbox champion), Masai Electro, max b, rahzel (also a member of The Roots), and click, the app gives you a basic MPC-style interface and sequence timeline on which you can create and share mixes. Watching the video clips at top is sort of fun as you play, and this does demonstrate that all kinds of creative musical apps could be built in Flash (and made more sophisticated than this one, if you like):

Verizon Beatbox Mixer

… now, if there were just some samples from former Verizon spokesperson James Earl Jones, this would be really cool. You can read through clunky marketing prose about how these artists are using the “online community space” (I’m guessing you already know what the Internet is good for if you’re here); instead, skip straight to mixing your own stuff and check out these very talented beatboxers. There’s a live performance planned this week in New York as part of the Digital Life expo.

The best link here is max b’s own beatbox tutorial site, including video tutorials to take on your PSP or iPod:

beatbox.tv

My friend Francis Preve, tech author and electronica producer / remix artist, has a new title out on Backbeat Books assembling a broad range of production tips, tutorials, and anecdotes from artists. (He’s pictured here, though that’s not actually his pool.) You may know Fran’s writing from Keyboard; for The Remixer’s Bible, he’s assembled Keyboard’s best club production tutorials, the best of the Dance Mix column, and tips and anecdotes from BT, Armand Van Helden, Thunderpuss, and others.

The most interesting decision for the book, though, is to include remixable music from Gabriel & Dresden, Coldcut, Meat Beat Manifesto, and Jacinta on the CD-ROM in Ableton Live 5/6 format. I like the hands-on approach there; will be curious to hear what remixing readers cook up.

I haven’t seen the book in the flesh yet, but I know a lot of what’s in it, and it should be easily worth the absurdly low pricetag Backbeat put on it:

Last Night a Dj Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey

Fran’s other projects include “working on some new original dance tracks, kibbutzing with Josh Gabriel (of Gabriel & Dresden fame), and continuing to lay the groundwork for that dance label [I] keep talking about.” You can find his sound design in the instrument racks in Live 6, too — more on that later. But here’s the interesting part:

Fran says he’s “putting finishing touches on his patches for a secret new product from Korg“.

Reeeeeally? Knowing Fran, I’m guessing this is software, though I’d love a cute new Korg synth to keep around the place. I’ll just sit here and drool and wait, I guess.

So, other Keyboard writers want to brag about your projects? Jim? Craig? Steve? Mike? Ernie? Can you reveal any secret projects in the process?