Jason Bentley dives into a music technology panel with Native Instruments in Berlin

by: Lucy Davidson Jul 9, 2015

Historically, Berlin’s history has allowed the city to become one of the world destinations for a thriving techno and club scene. Today, Berlin retains a deserved reputation as one of the most liberal, creative, and electronic-music-friendly cities in the world. Because of this, the city has also become a magnet for tech startups and established companies that specialize in music software and hardware. Jason Bentley, music director of Los Angeles’ NPR station KCRW, travelled to Berlin to for a “crash course” in the bastion of counterculture and to speak with some of its most innovative residents, including Tobias Thon of Native Instruments and Ben Fawkes of SoundCloud.

In a panel, Jason Bentley discusses some of the unique characteristics of Berlin and music technology innovations with Thon and Fawkes. He uncovers Native Instruments’ new endeavor of music format STEMs, set to launch this summer. STEMs allows DJs to skirt past the inability manipulating individual tracks and instead allows tracks to be treated in a remixing fashion. The format is open source and divides each track into four separate channels like bassline, drumline, melody, and vocals. This breakthrough allows DJs to pull apart the track and play with it in a way that only producers could have before.

Stream the full panel below: