Wow, don’t know how long this has been up but it’s fascinating. The “stems’ (21st century word for “tracks”) from Like A Rolling Stone – Bob’s vocal, guitar and harmonica on one, drums and organ on another, another guitar on the next one and finally bass and piano. The latter is intriguing – they are just NOT TOGETHER! But as with so many of these things, once you hear the whole mix it is of course brilliant. The piano is quite low in the final mix but it’s there.
I’ve heard a few of these things – there are Fabs examples all over the internet. At the Rolling Stones exhibition a few years ago there were, from memory, 8 songs you could listen to, and the two things that stood out for me were, first of all Nick Hopkins’ piano (on I think Angie) – he had such a beautiful melodic sense and his sense of time and rhythm was immaculate. The other one that was a surprise was Start Me Up – Mick Jagger’s solo vocal is full of spit and mutterings that most engineers would get rid of these days.
Anyway, I’m off to, er, play a decent piano part of LARS…
https://thecuttingedge.bobdylan.com/jam/like-a-rolling-stone
Stems grow into flowers.
Paraphrasing @RobC
Dear Mush,
Do you like the taste of ashram food? I am not a f*****ng hippy. Peace and Love.
Yours
Sri Emperor Moon Weasel,
Bubo Spinney,
Lower Dripcock,
Nether Snurtle.
Fuck me
From the darkest recesses of a yurt
It’s RobC !
Bespoke fully air conditioned en suite yurt, Junior my friend. Heads only. No Hippies eg. Scholl shod cabbage smelling earth mother types and tin whistle dreadlocked stash stealing camper van dog on ropers.
The individual tracks from “Long train running” are out there and they are an object lesson in playing. Individually they sound ok but nothing outstanding – all together, magic happens and the whole is massively more than the sum of the parts.
I love this kind of stuff. I wonder when they started calling them “stems”? They used to just be called “tracks”, which I suppose is quite confusing. “Stems” is better.
My holy grail was always the Tubular Bells stems. And lo and behold, Mike Oldfield released these online as part of a remix competition a few years ago! Just the first fourteen minutes, but still.
They seem to have disappeared from the internet now but luckily I kept a copy at the time. They are fascinating – 16 stems. Similar to what Twang says above, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The individual guitar bits are all fairly dry and off sounding, but they lock together beautifully.
It also goes to show how hard it must have been to mix properly. You can try it yourself and it’s really hard to get the balance of instruments into that magic sweet spot. A very particular skill, mixing.
Stems and tracks are different Art. Tracks are the lowest common denominator, individual tracks on the desk. So you might have kick drum, snare too, snare bottom, ride cymbal. A track might be a few microphones mixed together at recording to create a mono or stereo track (often for drums for example). Stems are generally where subsets of tracks are subsequently mixed together to create part of the overall mix e.g. “drums” with all the drum tracks in it. “Rhythm Guitars”, “Harmonies” etc. The idea is someone could remix the song up to a point by rebalancing the stems, or not using them at all. It’s normal in mixing to group sets of tracks as submixes (drums, harmonies etc etc) but they’re then balanced up to create a final mix. The stems concept means you produce a final mix but then make a set of stems available too for other mixers to have a go at.
I don’t have the Bob ones so I don’t know if they’re tracks or stems but the Doobies ones are tracks, not stems.
Possibly TMI.
PS would love a copy of those Oldfield tracks…