Finding Stems for Charting | mari@macintosh.garden
Before we begin, I'd like to get three terms that I'll be using a lot straight, so no one's confused:
- Mixed audio customs refer to ones without individual instrument parts—they're just an MP3 you play along to.
- Multitracks are the rawest ingredients of a recording. Every guitar overdub, every vocal line, every drum mic, separated on their own. They come unprocessed and unmixed. You'd have to add the effects and get everything sounding good yourself if you were to use them for a custom.
- Stems are a middle ground. They're separated instruments, but some processing and sweetening has usually been done on them, vocals have their reverb and EQ, etc. Separated audio from music games are stems.
I've yet to release a "mixed audio" custom. These are the most common form custom songs for rhythm games take. Partially, I don't like not having my instrument drop out when I fuck up, and partially, I hate listening to an annoying vocal sound over and over to chart a tricky drum part or inaudible bass. I've tried charting on mixed audio, I really have, but it just doesn't work for me.
Problem being, every song in existence has a mono or stereo mixdown, like you'd get on a CD or stream on Spotify. Very, very few songs have available stems or multitracks. Sure, devs like Harmonix can get ahold of them from the people who own the masters—after paying a nice fee and negotiating some royalty payments. I don't have any money, and I doubt the labels would entertain my requests for stems for a 15-year-old rhythm game even if I did.
So what are my options? How do I get stems for my customs?
Honestly, you'd be surprised at just how many avenues there are for getting stems or multitracks if you're willing to be crafty and occasionally explore less known or outright independent music. I like to think all my customs are proof that you don't have to give up music from bands and artists as big as Nirvana, Weezer, America, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Led Zeppelin, to name a few, in order to always have a nice, strong set of stems to go with your chart.
Here are all of the places I've tapped for stems. We'll go most restrictive to least restrictive as far as our choices go.
"I only want master recordings and only from gigantic bands I've heard of"
Buy them
This is both the most and least obvious route. You can buy multitracks now! Online! Not many, but lots of big, big music is available through something like Mix the Music. Obviously, this costs money, and you're intentionally prevented from exporting the multitracks, as they're tied to a proprietary DAW called Studio One. Ripping might prove tricky. That said, this site has acts as big as Stevie Wonder, The Killers, The Allman Brothers Band, and James Brown, so the incentive is surely there for one of you.
I've yet to do anything myself this way, though the slightly extended version of Scandal's "The Warrior" in Guitar Hero II Deluxe 2.0 comes from a mix of officially-bought stems from our former friend Rocker1999.
Rip them from another game
My next, more practical suggestion: look to other rhythm games. People have been doing recharts of mediocre Harmonix and Neversoft charts for an awfully long time, but really, that's only scratching the surface. If you're willing to look to more maligned games, clone games (I've stolen stems from Phase Shift before), or games that aren't five-button rhythm games, you can find some fairly popular songs waiting for you in their files. Just know you'll almost certainly need to remake their charts. Here's two examples:
FreQuency and Amplitude
Both games very fun in their own right, and also rife for stem ripping. You'll need Samplitude to reconstruct stems for them (both games store their songs as samples of guitar chords and snare hits and vocal pieces, not stems), but they sound pretty good, if occasionally a bit low-cut and repetitive from reuse of choruses and drum patterns.
Customs I've done with these stems: "Dope Nose" by Weezer, "Worst Mistake" by Curve, "I Am Hated" by Slipknot
Power Gig: Rise of the SixString
Regardless of how you feel about its gameplay, Power Gig has a pretty damn good setlist, and all master recordings! There's rips of these stems floating around, and I'm looking to investigate how the game stores its audio so I can get a proper first generation version of its stems.
Customs I've done with these stems: "Substitution" by Silversun Pickups
Jammit
If those aren't doing it for you, and you want songs that have never appeared in a rhythm game, try hunting down rips from apps like the now-defunct Jammit. Jammit was notorious for having full stems and a mixer built into its app. It was meant to teach musicians how to play along with their favorite songs, but stems are stems. People have indeed ripped the audio from the app for use elsewhere.
Customs I've done with these stems: "Ventura Highway" by America, "Dimension" by Wolfmother
Just plain getting lucky
Sometimes, you can find stems and multitracks from bands that circulate just because. These are usually from bootlegs or leaked by rogue remixers or studio employees (presumably). Led Zeppelin has had a few takes of some of their most prominent songs floating around in multitrack form on bootlegs for some time now, and Nirvana has a few master tape transfers floating around online, some scratch takes from Nevermind and some tracks from the In Utero sessions.
This is really, really rare though. Don't count on it. You can usually find these on sites like Remixpacks. Just remember not to download anything marked "RB"—Rock Band is certainly a valid place to get stems, but you're better off getting the raw DLC or game disc and decrypting it with an old version of C3 CON Tools than you are relying on someone's likely second-generation rip. Then you'll just have a clean MOGG you can import directly into Audacity.
Customs I've done with these stems: "Very Ape" by Nirvana
"I'm okay with them being covers, but I still want them to be songs I know"
Karaoke/backing tracks
The quality of these can be extremely variable, but I've heard decent things out of JamKazam in particular, who sell stems of famous songs as recorded by mostly tribute acts. Especially if you're trying to capture that WaveGroup feeling, I'd recommend checking into these. People have ripped all of them, so ask in MiloHax and someone will be able to supply you.
No customs like this just yet, but I've got a few songs lined up for an eventual all-covers marfGH.
Rock Revolution
Not all the covers are bad. Stems are stems. The game only stores its audio in 160kbps MP3 (for PS3, 360 uses WMA of all things), but this isn't that much of an issue with the crowd noise and shit on top.
No customs like this either, but plenty I plan to do, like with the JamKazam stuff.
Record soundalikes yourself
I'm not even joking here. If you fancy yourself a multitalented sort, you can just cover the songs yourself and chart them (or use other people's covers, of course). I've heard a few people do this to pretty great effect, and again, it captures that WaveGroup early-GH vibe like nothing else. That said, you'll need to be a decent musician first. Have you been practicing guitar, young man?
Customs I've done with these stems: "Doctor Worm" by They Might Be Giants (as covered by Maxton!)
"I don't mind charting smaller or unknown songs"
Cambridge Music Technology
A lot of folks online have offered their multitracks and project files to music students for practicing their mix skills on. If you're not adamant about charting nothing but Avenged Sevenfold, or you'd like to go off the beaten path and find new bands to listen to, a lot of these folks are indie bands from around the world in a variety of genres and they're ripe for use in rhythm games.
One of the biggest repositories I've found for indie multitracks is the Cambridge "Mixing Secrets" Multitrack Download Library. Here, you can get full uncompressed project file renders for over 500 songs across damn near every genre that isn't classical (and there's still some orchestral stuff in it!) Some of the songs actually get fairly abrasive and experimental—I've found sludgy stoner rock and proggy bands recording guitar solos in 6/8 alike in here. I'd say find a genre you like and browse.
Be forewarned: these are multitracks, as said. The tracks will be rather dry, and you'll need to mix them down into usable stems yourself. It's worth it to track down the final mix from the artist in question and see how close you can replicate it. (That said, if you just fold the tracks down dry, they can sometimes match some of the bonus tracks from GH1/GH2 in quality, as those often used earlier, dry mixes too.)
Customs I've done with these multitracks: I have two half-completed, one for Impossible Colours' "Dunerider" and one for Lead Inc's "The Dice". Both will probably appear on marfGH: Volume 2 towards the end of 2022.
Seeking out Creative Commons musicians
Sadly, it's a lost art, but a lot of indie folks back in the 2000s were quite happy to release remix stems of their work under Creative Commons, which is a permissive copyright license that allows for open reuse of material, provided you follow the stipulations of the license (attribution, not making money from it, sharing your work under the same copyright license, etc.)
I'd say a good place to start is looking on ccMixter. Not every song on ccMixter has full stems (there's plenty that only have acapellas), but all the Creative Commons artists whose work I've mined for stems, you can at least discover through ccMixter.
Customs I've done with these stems: "Code Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton, "Time to Take Out the Trash" by Brad Sucks, "Up Up Up Up Up" by State Shirt (one of my oldest! and needs to be redone...)
Asking indie musicians
This is really only an option for indie musicians, but you'd be surprised at how willing even non-fans of rhythm games are to helping out. I mean, they get to make someone who likes their music happy and potentially get something cool to share to their social media, you get to make a cool chart for a band you like—win-win!
Of course, there's no one way to go about this. Email them, hit them up on Twitter or places, and ask if they'd be willing to share the multitracks for a song or two. Worst they can say is no, and when I get a response back, it's usually actually fairly excited and cordial, or at least amused. (I find making up some shit about the game "needing" individual instrument parts helps a lot.)
Your mileage may vary as to whether you get multitracks or stems. I've had to partially recreate mixes from artists I like, while others came basically fully assembled.
Customs I've done with these stems: "Stay Inside Your Station" by c.layne, "Dear Kate" by Ben Minnotte
"I don't even care if they're legit multitracks"
Real desperate for stems? Been there. Here's the best help I can be:
MIDI/soundtrack-sourced stems
Old video game consoles, rather than using more traditional digital audio, would generate waveforms electronically and play them, technically, as multitracks (as they use multiple "voices" or "channels", as they're known). Whether you can cleanly separate out instruments depends on the console, but it is possible, very possible! N64 games are a great example of what you can do with stems sourced from video game music.
You'll have even better luck if you're trying to get stems from computer music like MIDIs or tracker music. Since these files are always technically editable, you can use a program like SynthFont to render each instrument in a MIDI out to different audio files (and then use the MIDI itself as a tempomap to boot!). I wouldn't recommend this for MIDI recreations of real songs (though of course you could), but for stuff that originated as MIDI? It's surprisingly effective and fun, especially if you use a good soundfont.
Customs I've done with these stems: "Passport Please" (passport.mid)
Of course, this inches closer and closer into outright bleep bloop/FL Studio custom territory. Most bleep bloop authors do not include stems with their customs, but occasionally, they'll release the project files so you can generate them yourself. We did that for "Speed Test" in Guitar Hero II Deluxe, and then the "80's" cover from HalfDuck was done with stems from the man himself, bringing this full circle.
AI-generated (DIY) stems
This is the ultimate cheat. These are computer programs trained to be able to tell what isolated drums, guitar, bass, and vocals sound like, and you can then give them a stereo mixdown and they'll generate "split" or "DIY" stems from the stereo track. Like magic, you can then pull the drums right out of a song, all on their own.
You should expect nothing from these. They can and will sound messy and weird. Occasionally, they're harder to chart on than just the plain mixed audio. That said! The form is advancing rapidly. The newest splitters like Demucs are a gigantic improvement over anything I've heard from Splitter, which was my former go-to for DIY stems. Demucs drums and bass in particular come out more than adequate for charting purposes.
If you're going to generate DIY stems, I have two recommendations.
- Start from lossless. You'll already get lossy-like warbles in the final stems. Best not to add to it. At the very least, it gives me peace of mind. Most splitter programs will let you use WAVs or FLACs.
- Use the least busy mix possible. A dense mix will always give you messier results than a less dense mix. If you can use even partially-mixed stems from games like the early Guitar Hero titles or maybe a surround sound mix where instruments are panned across five channels, you can often get very very clean splits, even with lesser programs.
Customs I've done with these stems: My "Trippolette" and "Graveyard Shift" upgrades, and any of the GH2:DX songs that now feature drums use DIY stems for the drum part
As an amusing end note, Harmonix themselves often use DIY stems for Rock Band 4 DLC these days, even for songs that had full stems in older rhythm games. This means that by using DIY stems, you're essentially making Harmonix-quality customs.
Hopefully that gave you a lot to chew on as far as getting stems for charts. I imagine a lot of people can't be assed and will just use an MP3, and that's alright. I just find fun in tracking stuff like this down, personally.