Now that it has officially entered the chat ahead of Donda 2, it’s time to explore his potential influence in technology and the Stem Player’s functionality. The Stem Player is just the latest example of Ye’s pioneering efforts throughout his career - in music, fashion, live spectacles, and more. Badbadnotgood’s “Love Proceeding” was reduced to just two stems: drums and not drums.A post shared by ye in partnership by Yeezy Tech and Kano Computing, the Stem Player first surfaced last August - the same month of the original Donda‘s long-awaited arrival. In fact, I often encountered this issue with music I uploaded to the Stem Player myself. Then the fourth stem, which is supposed to be for bass, was basically silent. The Armed’s “An Iteration,” for example, was broken down into drums, vocals and a single track of everything else. It would seem that fairly stripped-down hip hop productions will do ok, but as the complexity of a song increases the Stem Player starts to struggle parsing the different parts.
There was also a decent amount of digital artifacts in the stems. Half the bass line was on its own track, while the other half was lumped in with the drums. The Stem Player handled “DIRTY!” from JPEGMAFIA and “Stonefruit” by Armand Hammer reasonably well, though there was some slight bleed through of the synth line into the vocal stem on “Stonefruit.” Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer” fared a little worse. The whole thing vibrates, too, with haptic feedback every time you touch a button or a strip, though it can lag behind your actual touch quite a bit. The main controls on the front are four touch-sensitive strips that light up to tell you what volume a track is at or what effect you’ve selected, for instance. And the vaguely fleshy hue doesn’t help matters. It doesn’t feel unpleasant, exactly, but it is slightly unnerving. It looks kinda like a sex toy, though, and is covered in what I assume are surplus Fleshlights. You can also create loops of little song chunks, reverse them, speed them up, slow them down and even add effects.
Or if you find the sonar ping synth in “Jonah” unbearable, just turn it off. For instance, if you’re wondering what “Off the Grid” would sound like as an instrumental you can simply turn down the vocals. Using it you can change the volume of different stems, or tracks, in the songs on Donda. So what is it? Well, it’s basically a tiny puck-shaped computer dedicated specifically to remixing Kanye’s latest album.
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