Source Material (Acapellas/Instrumentals/Stems)

[Frail Limb Purity]

This is just a jumbled thought so bare with me.

Source material, what is your stance on it? not in a How do you feel THING, but like how do you go about finding/storing/using stuff?

FINDING: i've had people ask me for stuff alot, and some even offer trades. Honestly, if someone asks i'll usually hand it over (on the off chance that i still have it somewhere). Some even go as far as to ask me where i get my stuff, which was always a tough question to answer...

Personally, i dont have a specific place i go... at least not anymore, if i really want to mix something i'll figure out if it exists and find it, wherever it may be.


STORING: I dont have much stored, maybe a few stems and a handful of acapellas. I dont horde as much as i used to. There was a point where i was like "IT SAYS ACAPELLA, I HAVE TO HAVE IT!!"

Not so much anymore, i dont have a huge library of stems or anything on my computer. I'm not one to mess with organizing stuff so my computer gets clogged real easy. I know some of you got 40gb's of pellas & every guitar hero mogg. . . but who exactly? Speak Up, not that it matters. im just curious.


USING: on the chance you have 40gb's of pellas, are you really going to use every source? I only really download stuff i know i'm going to use.


In closing, i'm not knocking the collectors. Should probably mention i've crashed like 4 hard drives since i started doing this. I remember Nosbic being distraught at losing his collection, and i remember being just as sad/if not sadder when it first happened to me. at this point, i dont even mind anymore. Like if this machine died out tomorrow, i'd be like "oh well".

Furthermore, Do some of ya'll have desktops/laptops completely devoted to productions? I'd like to have one but since forever my machine has doubled as a average house computer/maker of noise.

I'm sitting here trying to finish a remix for a project and my sister walks in like "Can i check my email?"

LoL!!


as i said, a jumbled thought... could probably clean up whatever i wrote but i stand by it.

In closing my ACID PRO MIXING folder has almost 4gb's of stuff... pellas/stems/instrumentals.


yeah.


-t.

[Hifi Banjo Strings]

Finding
I mainly just look around the web for stuff. I mean, sure, I get direction from Blacklabelled and a few other places, but yeah, if someone asks for something I have, I've no problem sending it to them..

Storing
I'm afraid I'm one of those people. Well, partly.. I've a bunch of stuff stored on an ext HD (around 80 GB and the last count) and yep, there was a time when if something was labelled 'acapella' or 'instrumental', I'd grab it, but that was when I was just building up my store. Now that I've got more stuff than I can possibly mix (I'll get that that in a bit), I can afford to be a bit more eclectic with my downloading. For example, just stuff that I like or really want to use. Which brings me to my next point..

Using
I'll probably never use about 40% of the stuff I've downloaded. Sometimes, it's out of reverence for the original, other times I just haven't found something that fits it yet and other times, I just like listening to the separated multitracks. Sometimes, it's a case of all three (e.g. CCR - Have you Ever Seen The Rain?)

I would be devastated if my HD crashed. I keep meaning to get another HD to back it all up onto, but until then, I live in fear that next time I turn my laptop on, it's just going to fizzle out.. I mean, it's not that I can't get the majority of it all back from the places I got it before, just.. ehh..

A desktop solely for musical production? I wish! I'd have one for normal use, one for games and one for music.. When I get enough money, it's on my list of things to splash out on.

[RockstarBruski]

I don't have that much downloaded for mentals and pellas. I have more original songs I've ripped from my CD's and I have a friend who lives near me we exchange DVD copies of music every now and then. I'm usually thinking I'd like to mash that then I find out it's not available as a pella. One good place I've found just for listening to CDs is the local public library. Mine has a bunch and if I want anything I can order it online for free and they'll find it from another library. They let me check them out for 30 days so I can take my time listening to them

For the collection I do have I back it up to two external 2TB hard drives. I bought them on sale for $150 each at some good sale. I've had internal and external HD's crash and it's really more about the labor I'd have to do again to recreate my laptop and collection than the collection itself as I don't have time to rebuild everything.

So, I use Norton Ghost automatic back up at night Iwhich backs up the OS and everyting so usually if I have a laptop hd crash it will only take about 2 hours to restore to the last good backup and I'm back and running like nothing happened and every month I manually copy my new downloads from my laptop hard drive to my two external hard drives.

I have other computers that I could use soley for mashing and mixing but I mostly use my laptop as I do a lot of it on the bus on my 45 minute commute time. Sometimes the bus ride isn't long enough for me! but it's good use of my time and makes the bus ride go by very quickly!

[Bynar]

FINDING:

For the past 12 years I have a folder called 'Liquid Room' (named after Edinburgh's Liquid Room venue where I spent almost all of my nights as a post-grad student) where I store all the songs I like and use in my DJ sets, podcasts, radio shows, and blog, which means that every time I listen to an album and I like a track, I copy it into that folder. At the moment, 'Liquid Room' has about 15,000 hand-picked tracks - and keeps on growing! Having imported them all into MiK (that was a tedious task!), every time I listen to a track I feel it has mashup potential, I check out to see whether there is an acapella or instrumental version of it available online (Discogs.com and then soulseek, acapellas4u.co.uk etc.).

If not, I either try to make it myself or ask around. Additionally, I tend to use tracks by unknown indie bands that I feature in my blog and podcasts, so I frequently ask them personally for the stems of their tracks, and most of the times they send them over. Of course, if it's OK with the band, I share the stems or just give them away to anyone who asks for them.

STORING:

I frequently back up 'Liquid Room' and my stems on an external hard drive, but due to my laptop's recent hard disk failure I lost MiK's database and now I have to re-import everything into MiK. So, from now on I'll back MiK's database, too - too bad I had to learn the hard way. Hopefully, if I ever manage to find a job (Greece isn't the ideal place to live at the moment), I intend to buy a laptop devoted to music production. In the meantime, my old Acer will have to serve all of my needs...

USING:

Since I mainly produce moody mashups that I want to listen to myself (e.g., electronica, drum & bass, dubstep, industrial, gothic, breaks, indie, and electro), I do not hoard stems that I know I am never going to use (i.e., Top-40 material). Of course I don't mean to diss the collectors, but downloading every Lady Gaga or Adele stem available is not my thing.

[darbus]

I seem to follow the trend of the members that have responded.

I typically only find (or try to find) the source materials only for mashups that I think I want to make. Sometimes I get lucky and find the sources I want to use, other times I don't and have to scrap the idea - or rather table it until sources become available. Because of that, I don't have a lot of source materials saved up, and actually, I'm considering trashing the one that I've tried unsuccessfully to use.

[DJ Firth]

FINDING:
Google is a godsend, literecords, Blacklabelled, acapellablog, etc.

STORING:
On my laptop HDD and backup on my external HDD every month or so.

USING:
I've got 11GB of Instrumental and Acapella tracks, they are all of tracks I like and the reason I keep them is that they are all ordered in Virtual DJ in order of BPM and Key so when I get a new sources in I can instantly try it with loads of other's in the same BPM and Key range. I'll only use maybe 10% max of what I have, but still.. it's not exactly taking up room I don't have so I'll keep stacking it up.