The 2024 Acapella & Stems DJing Revolution [Live Q&A]

In 2024, DJing has changed forever, thanks to the “Acapella & Stems DJing Revolution”. Watch the lesson above to learn about the “dark art” of acapella mixing, where we delve into why they’re so special, where to find them, how to make them sound good, and more.

Here’s what’s covered…

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:47 Why they’re special
• 3:14 The “dark art” of acapella mixing
• 4:59 Where do DJs get acapellas?
• 6:17 How to get track stems quickly (for free)
• 7:58 Why prep acapellas & stems ahead of time?
• 9:10 Best dedicated software for extracting acapellas
• 12:22 What the music industry doesn’t want you to know..
• 16:29 The biggest problem when mixing acapellas
• 17:09 How to use “Fuzzy Keymixing”
• 20:26 Don’t get left behind: How To Mix With Acapellas (& Stems)
• 23:13 What about Engine DJ stems on standalone gear?
• 28:05 How to use stems in Traktor?
• 29:45 Do stems actually sound good in a performance?

Lesson Notes

One interesting idea that’s starting to gain traction with me, is that there may well be a middle ground between the two ways stems are currently being used by DJs.

To recap the two ways, we could call them the hobby way and the pro way. The hobby way is using the awesome features built into DJ software for real-time stems separation. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s fun but it is a little bit risky, as you never know exactly what’s going to happen when you press that button. And also (as we know) the quality is not always the best.

The pro way is very different. Using professional software way before a gig, stems are prepared, then back in DJ software, routines are rehearsed, giving a safe, reliable way of performing on the biggest stages without any surprises – and of course the quality is very high.

Read this next: Acapella & Stems – Prepare First, Or Use Real-Time Features?

Crucially as well, pre-preparing stems (which then effectively are just acapellas, instrumental files or whatever) means that you can play them on any DJ gear, including standalone gear and professional equipment, that at the time of writing, doesn’t have real-time stems at all.

The future for stems

In the future, my suspicion is that pre-preparing stems is going to become the norm, though it’s going to become a lot easier and more intuitive.

Think about it: your DJ software already pre-analyses your songs to find BPM and key, and to add beatgrids, build waveforms, work out volume and so on. As processors get more powerful and as hard discs get larger, your software will pre-analyse your songs for stems as well, just like it does all the other things, and you won’t even know.

Then you’ll be able to practise with those stems, you’ll be able to listen to them individually and – crucially – if you then wish to go and play on standalone gear without a laptop (when you export from your DJ software to a USB drive) those stems will be ready to put onto the drive.

The next generation of standalone gear will have the controls to switch stems on and off, and will expect you to have done the pre-analysis beforehand.

This will give DJs the best of both worlds – the ability to properly practise with stems, the high quality of pre-prepared stems, and the convenience of not having to do any of the preparation in separate software, because DJ software will do it for them.

Get our course: How To Mix With Acapellas (& Stems)

Indeed this is already an option in VirtualDJ and Serato, albeit slightly hidden, and is being used even today by DJs whose laptops are not powerful enough to give them true real-time stems, to give the illusion of that. The more I think about it, the more I think this could be the way stems are done as a norm in the future.