Stuff you noticed thanks to stems

Have you ever discovered any "hidden" sounds in stems, instrumentals or acapellas?

I was listening to Lily Allen's "Air Balloon" and I noticed that, in the chorus, Lily's is in the background singing "air balloon, air balloon" in a high-pitched chipmunk voice.

In the Guitar Hero: Metallica multitracks of "Ace of Spades", Lemmy says an extra lyric: "That's right, babe!" That's because the song was re-recorded for the game, as the original multitracks are lost.

In the instrumental of Crystal Castles' Celestica, a synth is playing the exact same notes Alice Class sings.

Well, I noticed that "Harder to Breathe" has elevator music in the background, that I had never heard before.

Bohemian Rhapsody... Lemme tell you, I hear the Melody, and maybe three other vocal lines for the song. There are about 8. (7 if you count them as "pitches") Wow...

Talk Dirty to Me by Jason Derulo, I inverted all the tracks and listened to them separately, and the "Get Jazzy on Em'" is very... Demonic.

EWF - September, got to listen to isolated "Baa Dee Ahh" on there. Which proves me wrong on the lyrics I thought I heard. (Something like "Ahh Yee Hahh" or something.)

Besides that, I compared remade songs from the game Elite Beat Agents to the originals with Multitracks, and found that each and every one uses at least one stem from the song! That's amazing to me.

Always, the last one in my mind is OneRepublic's "If I Lose Myself" there were those amazing hidden bells just like church bells which I never even heard in the original song.

I don't recall which one, but I recall listening to one of the Beatles tracks. You could hear Yoko in the background saying "John kinda sounds like a fag, doesn't he?" - or something that sounded very much like that.

Here's something to add to this.
I had an interesting experience today, with a local radio DJ Bob Rivers of "twisted Tunes' fame here along with the #1 Jimi Hendrix tribute guy Randy Hansen. Both of them belong to a band called Heart by Heart, with Heart drummer Mike Derosier and founding Heart bassist Steve Fosset, who was also supposed to be here for listening to some Heart multitracks... Steve couldn't make it.

Randy and I started listening to Hendrix's 3rd Stone From the Sun multitrack. He wanted to hear it because it contains some pretty weird stuff...

Well, here's what we isolated and time/pitch corrected... in the whole mix, you really can't make anything out because it's so buried and slow...

Randy just about cried when he heard this.

[SOUNDCLOUD]https://www.soundcloud.com/wolfemacleod/3rd-stone-vocal[/SOUNDCLOUD]

Wow! Awesome stuff, guys!

I was listening to 2pac's adlib layer from Thugs Get Lonely Too, and there is one part towards the end where you hear him rustling some papers and his pager goes off while in the booth. It's interesting what goes on in the background (breathing, headphone leakage, others talking or recording, etc...), and it's kind of eerie in a way.

Yeah, that's awesome, it gives you the illusion of being in the studio.

The recording sessions for t.A.T.u.'s "Nas Ne Dogonyat" leaked a few years back. Some guitar parts that were in the demo also were in the pack, and you can hear t.A.T.u. giggling in the background. Also, almost everything about If U Seek Amy br Britney is so harsh-sounding and very basic synths, like, Casio-sounding synths... But altogether it sounds great.

Yeah, also Lady Gaga's synths on her first few singles are pretty ugly when separated.

at the end of bohemian rhapsody on one of the tracks you can hear freddy saying oh f**k it
i think they removed that in the final track

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SuperShark61

at the end of bohemian rhapsody on one of the tracks you can hear freddy saying oh f**k it
i think they removed that in the final track

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I was just showing my music teacher that. It's quite funny to be honest, they should have left it much quieter, but still in the mastered version.

Not hidden, but that wild string section and synthesizer track in Here Comes The Sun made me want to find more multitracks. Made my buddy and I want to do a mix where we highlighted it, it just sounds so good! And in the original it's just so buried in the mix that you can't hear it...

I think mine would be in Britney's Drop Dead Beautiful there was this additional synth and other drums hidden beneath mix, which made me end up making a club dub based around those sections.

Lady Gaga's Monster was another one which these really deep warm synth chord underneath.

This is a pretty lame one, but in john newman's love me again, he makes a sort of weird pidgeon sound at about 1:48 (in the youtube version) It sounds alot funnier and out of place on the acapella :D

Sort of on-topic, but I've coined the phrase "pseudosounds" for areas of tracks that actually create sounds that weren't really intended to be heard in the way they are heard. Now I hunt for them all the time. For example, even in my own work that I have produced, I have generated a mix-down of a track that has a split second where you can hear a bell ringing as clear as day, but taking apart all of the stems gives you no such thing. It's the combination of specific sounds in the stems that generate this effect, although it is not intended. ;)

Two that come to mind that I always thought were other instruments:

1: At 2:09 in Bohemian Rhapsody just after Freddie sings "... shivers down my spine", I always thought that was a wind chime, but on the 24 track you can here it's clearly Brian May scraping his pick either behind the nut or bridge.

2: The Doobie Brothers "Listen To The Music" at 0:36 and continuing for the rest of the song, what I believed to be a banjo turns out to be pan steels drums!!!

Linkin Park's 'Living Things':

In My Remains - Electronics behind the first verse, never heard them until the instrumental came out. I still don't hear it some of the time after 3 years!

Burn it Down - The dotted-style keys starting at about 1:53 in the instrumental, I do not know how I missed those. So damn obvious to me now.

Yesterday I noticed two of Corey Taylor's coughs in the vocal track of Slipknot's Snuff, the first at 3:10 if you amplify the 2 seconds before the "oh-ho" and the visible cough at 3:16

I pay attention mostly to the way a song is being sung so I can sing along better, lol

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SuperShark61

at the end of bohemian rhapsody on one of the tracks you can hear freddy saying oh f**k it
i think they removed that in the final track

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He's actually saying "Oh, fucking hell" (The "hell" gets cut off early, which is why many people mishear it as "oh, fuck it".)

on Madonna borderline you can hear her say "should I stop" then the desk engineer/producer says "Sing Sing"

on band on the run you can hear paul stamping his feet along to the beat to keep time.

I will try to remember a few others and then add them in to this post.

i also heard on the queen - bohemian rhapsody multi, freddie and brian burp at the start, and laugh, then says, right, klets fuckin do this tracks then,,

DragonForce - Through the Fire and Flames, Guitar Hero Smash Hits/Greatest Hits stem set has the keys and backing/rhythm guitar in one stem. I immediately could tell that the backing guitar was played by someone other than Herman Li or Sam Totman.

The rhythm guitar stem from the Guitar Hero III stem set is completely different, and when I actually look at the DLC chart for RS 2014 (took bloody long enough), I observed that lead and rhythm guitar were charted in RS2014 as it was in GHIII.

When looking at the RB3 DLC stem set, I noticed that Keys is the chorus in the background for the majority of the song, but there are no separated vocals stems. Also, the guitar stem is lead and backing/rhythm combined, and sounds terrible by itself.

The drum stems from both Smash Hits and RB3 sets have odd echoes from other stems, but RB3's stem set is the worse of the two, with the vocals leaking in at points (kinda have to be listening for that because it isn't obvious but it is there).

In many songs with censored lyrics (due to the ESRB being a bunch of wussies or because of laaaaaaame copyright garbage or both), listening to the vocals stems often leads to hearing the censored lyrics either at a very low and next to inaudible level, or only partially censored lyrics, but enough to satisfy the pundits of censorship (yeah, don't get me started on them).

The backing vocals for Snot - Deadfall (Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock), are half-censored at best, but since the enunciation of the lyrics is rocket speed fast, that's no surprise. There are parts where one could re-add the censored lyrics (I did this already), and it doesn't sound too bad ('Well, vivé la f***ing France, man!' is all vocals so that is very easy).

There's likely a lot of things I've noticed, but what's really funny is that after hearing the stems, I can listen to the downmixed version and still hear the stems, if I focus on it....lol

on MJ's "Billy Jean" i've always thought, the basic "ohh" chords / sound is just a synth, but he sang and layered that damn thing for the whole song. No auto tune needed :-D

The GH WoR Stems for My Chemical Romance - Teenagers has shit partially censored. The lead is censored, but for some reason the backing vocals are just turned down and left in there.

Original volume

The "censored" part turned up

Fun Fact: In the DLC preview for the MCR pack in GH WoR, Teenagers is left uncensored.

Iggy Pop - Lust for Life. In between the first chorus and second verse (I think that's where it is) He says "Can I hold it?" Most likely making a reference to the mic. Sorry Iggy, but it would probably be a bad idea to hold a microphone like you're on stage in a studio setting.

On a more recent note, Irene Cara - Flashdance... What A Feeling has a few random takes of the chorus where she screws up on the first line. On one of the takes, she screws up and then says "Uh oh, shit."

Aerosmith - Eat the Rich has Steven Tyler making a lot of weird sounds throughout the entire song. A lot of times it sounds like he's quietly burping or clearing his throat REALLY loudly.

I can't think of anything off the top of my head but I would have noticed certain nuances that would have been hard to hear after being lost in the master mix.

But for me this didn't start with stems alone. It started when I listened to extended mixes and heard sounds I didn't notice before. At first I would dispute it being original and consider it an extra overdub since it was louder or I just never noticed the sound before. But then I would go back and listen to the radio mix and suddenly it was there and I had become aware. Become aware, lol. :-)

For example, INXS "New Sensation" has some synthy melody on the end, that stands out in the remix. John Waite "Missing You" features this wooden "knock knock" sound early on in the extended mix. Never heard that before but in the radio mix it is in there around the second half of each verse.

I realise I didn't give an stem examples so hopefully not too off topic. ;-)

Tom Petty used more samples fake instruments that I thought. Programmed hi hat on Free fallin' and programmed drums and even bass on Runnin' Down a Dream.

Also in general from a production engineering standpoint it's really interesting the hear the bass tones as those are often hard to get at from listening to a full track.