Some of you may be up for this.

https://www.beatportal.com/articles...rns-with-madonnas-grammy-winning-ray-of-light

My experience, down the years, recently too with these competitions is they're only really interested in what's being promoed, usually software, getting your email and hoping you'll sign up to their site etc, up to you though, as i can think of reasons why it would be useful to some.

 

I listened to the stems, and never realized what a horrible song it is. Those vocals are overdrenched in reverbs, the guitars are horrible, that drumbeat is pompous and stiff. Tasteless techno-pop for frumpy teens.

 

stems always sound terrible, i had that when i first listened to an 8-track of queen titles 20 years ago - but one must undertand that it is not about the stems...

...and if you werent aware about that before, you should try learn from the experience.

 

I agree with you, thetb303 is so lovely on it…. The stem quality maybe not

 

i think im going to have a go at this mixing...actually im a bit suprissed about the quality tho

 

its a good song... but its old.. why not remix something new?

 

The track is from when she was still in her 60's; how much newer do you want?

 

To be fair, to do a remix all you really need is the vocals as that is what the label will be looking for.
The music stems will be there so you can work out bass notes and so on.

 

Maybe UVR5 can do a great job here. I had great results with muddy/reverbish vocal with the right algo. As far as I remember there was a chart,how to separate vocals from track and FX and which algo to use.

Edit: I found the mentioned chart. This was really useful for decent results:

 

Last edited: Sep 15, 2025

I may be wrong, but wasn’t the Korg MS-20 William Orbit’s weapon of choice instead?

It’s a great album. ”Frozen” and ”Nothing Really Matters” are fantastic tracks.

 

Agreed, and so is The Power of Goodbye.

Just did a quick listen of the stems. Everything top notch, the arrangement and production as organic as it gets with that type of music.

She managed to carry out a rather demanding 5-minute song with a single lead vocal line. No other vocals whatsoever. I heard no autotune either. Hats off.

I assume the lead vocal track is wet because the effects are integral to the performance and production. Also, it reduces the remixers' potential for butchering it with their ideas of how it should have sounded.

 

Last edited: Sep 17, 2025

Well that sucks then....

Yeah clean vocals only is the right way.

 

i refused to participate in this

unmixable

 

ah, reduces creativity to a bare minimum in other words? Cool

Of course a track will win that is basically identical but with a different conga pattern or something, blown away

 

This is an example of excluded middle fallacy.

 

maybe the stems suck because they're using the leftover ones from the same remix competition they did in 2001

I want to think it was sponsored by (then) sonic foundry's acid? am I making that up