Occasionally you run into multimillion production multitrack stems and rock band stems. It is definitely informative and a lot of fun to mess with, you know, for educational remixes and just toying around. However, do you think we can get serious and, say, use sting's acapella vocal stems to check for 'verb or delay levels, or figure out compression ratios? Are these observations worth taking into account? I hope my question is not too silly.

All the best.

 

If they were single tracks maybe, but a mixed stem may be alot harder to glean any info from, given you dont know how many tracks were comp'd to make the stem.
Still, it is intresting to hear them , and may very well be useful to someone.

 

Useful if you wanna try and sound like somebody else, copying either their vocals or music (or both). Probably more useful and interesting to use those stems for remixes though. Personally I just get a buzz out of hearing some classic stripped down, so you can really hear what was played / sung track by track.

But like psyfactory said, not sure you can really get that much info about how each track was put together listening to stems... you'd need some kind of specialist, like a sample replay company to sort that side out for you. Scorccio seem to be the best for recreated samples, they got all the top jocks and producers using them. I bet they could easily figure out compression ratios and delay levels.

 

Thanks for the replies. What I meant with my question was the value of using such multitracks for educational purposes, for improving mixing chops. It was inspirational for me to see how Sir G. Martin made do with insane amounts of hiss in Sgt. Peepers, for instance. So, I wondered if there was some real value in analyzing stems. But then it makes a lot of sense your pointing out that those tracks are already comp'd. Who knows how the takes started out. Anyhow, it is amazing for me to read in Classic Tracks at Sound On Sound the way, say, Aha's Take On Me was produced and yet have a chance to take a look inside the tracks. Once again, thanks for your insight.