From Segues
to Stems

Editing has been around as long as magnetic tape itself, but thanks to the influence of avant-garde experimentation — via the likes of the French movement Musique Concrète, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, British innovator Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (who composed the Dr Who theme working with tape loops) — popular music increasingly embraced the splicing of tape as a creative outlet in the late 60s.

However, the vast amount of editing during this period was as a means of reduction; the art of snipping a lengthy album track down to a radio friendly three minutes or so. The big changes would come with the dawn of the disco era and the advent of the 12” single. This is where remix pioneers Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons would extend tracks to cater to the demands of the dance floor; a place where gradual builds and long breaks would really make their mark.

The first officially released 12”, “Ten Percent” by Double Exposure (issued by Salsoul in 1976 and ‘mixed’ by Gibbons) was actually an extended edit, credited on the label as ‘disco blending’. Moulton and Gibbons could look back to DJs like Francis Grasso at Sanctuary and Nicky Siano at The Gallery, who pioneered ‘changes’ or ‘blends’ (or what we initially referred to as ‘segues’ in the UK) before the term mixing was in use. They instigated the art of continuation, matching the beats in such a stealth-like fashion that the audience might not even notice that a new record had replaced the previous one. By this time, the twin turntables had become the standard DJ format for playing records in nightclubs and discotheques.

I quickly built my reputation as a mixing DJ, especially given the increasing amount of new electro-funk records released from ’82 onwards. This electronic direction in dance music was better suited to mixing than the less precise rhythms of a live drummer, no matter how good they might be. The drum machine was taking over with units like the Roland TR-808 and TR-909, the Oberheim DMX and the LinnDrum soon to monopolise dance productions.

One of the mixing techniques I really got into was ‘doubling up’ - playing two copies of the same record, with one perhaps four, two or just a beat behind the other. This act of repeating parts before mixing to another section of the track was essentially my own live edit. People who came to my nights were known to buy a record they’d heard me play, but take it back to the shop saying it was the wrong mix only to be informed it was the only mix!

It was this very technique that led to my appearance on the Channel 4 show The Tube in February 1983, giving the first live demonstration of mixing on British TV. A couple of researchers from the programme had come to Legend to see the singer David Joseph performing his debut single “You Can’t Hide (Your Love From Me)”. He was due to appear on The Tube and they had come to check him out. When they heard me doubling up with his record they asked me along too.

My mixes on Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio had taken things to a whole new level for me, and it was this that led me down the road of tape editing. I bought my first Revox B77 reel-to-reel just in time to record the Best Of ‘82 mix for Mike Shaft’s show featuring over 50 of the biggest tunes that year. The response to the mix was a revelation and kickstarted an end of year tradition that ran for a decade and through the rave era. I would pass on the baton to future World Mixing Champion Chad Jackson after the Best Of ‘83, who in turn handed in on to further custodians – Stu Allan and DJKA.

Skip forward into the new millennium and home computer editing programs instigated another significant movement among DJs worldwide. Rather than produce their own records, they began to cut up tracks from the past in order to make them relevant to the present. At first, as with the original re-edits, these were used as exclusives by the DJ’s who made them, but they’d subsequently be shared with other DJ’s, at first via CD-R’s, digital files or limited vinyl pressings, but later through the platform of SoundCloud, which was initially dependent on these very DJs for its growth.

The seeds of the current re-edit movement were sown in the 80’s via now classic edits by DJ’s like Danny Krivit (New York) and Ron Hardy (Chicago), which were subsequently pressed onto bootleg vinyl. Elsewhere in the Big Apple, crack edit crew The Latin Rascals were tearing up the airwaves, with Double Dee & Steinski fusing their DJ and studio engineering skills to devastating effect.

The re-edit momentum was further aided by the demise of vinyl, the majority of DJ’s switching CDJ and computer based formats, although, paradoxically, vinyl pressings of these re-edits helped keep the format alive. Along with Todd Terje, a young Norwegian DJ who was building himself a big reputation, I’d found myself at the vanguard of a swiftly evolving re-edit movement having returned to DJing in 2003. Having been totally detached from the club scene for a number of years, I had no idea that this edit culture had been bubbling away for a decade or more. This was pure serendipity for me, playing right into my hands.

The days of splicing tape now long gone, I’d entered the digital domain and was putting together my own edits and mash-ups (combining 2 or more separate tracks – generally the vocal from one and the backing from another) to play out and share. At the same time, I was getting music from others, either via CD-R or on limited vinyl, pressed up on labels like Better Days, Big Bear, Creative Use and G.A.M.M.

Computer gaming, and more specifically, the rhythm game genre, was to help shape the next phase. Rock Band devised a multiplayer music format that required popular classics being broken down into four stems — drums, bass, guitar and vocals. This became rich pickings for rework disciples, now able to rip these stems directly from the game and access a wealth of deconstructed recordings by some of the great artists of popular music — The Beatles included.

Rock Band has served to attune a coming generation of DJs to the logical next step: the performance of live remixes, with DJs rearranging the stems, while adding their own unique effects on the fly.

Stems, as such, provide a new format — another way of releasing music, especially (but not exclusively) current dance music. For, as Rock Band has proved, there’s a wealth of older material that might also be well served by stem availability - classics and hidden gems ripe for revival in this new 21st century context. They also provide a creative platform for DJs that was unimaginable when Francis Grasso was going through the changes and Kool Herc rode the merry-go-round.