Your eyes are closed. A lightweight, fleshy object is placed in your palm. You wonder: is this a sex toy?

You open your eyes and see what appears to be a flattened pantyhose-colored egg. It feels soft and skin-like. On the smooth rounded surface there is a circular button at the intersection of four pinky-sized imprinted lines. You press the button, triggering a vibration as it lights up. Your question remains unanswered: it’s a sex toy, no?

This is a perfectly natural response for anyone who is a virgin to the Yeezy Stem Player, a brand new portable audio remix device made in collaboration with Kano Computing. Even for those who do know, the first time handling it is unlike anything we’re used to in music, tech and gaming, a silicone universe away from the MP3 players of the past and sleek iPhones of today.

But what really is the Stem Player? In this first-ever Popcorn Brain Hardware Review, we give you the lowdown on what the Stem Player is, share our first impressions, and hand the device over to the audio technicians at Earforce in Amsterdam to get their expert opinions on this very Kanye gadget.

Stems

For Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West), the Stem Player is all about “revolutionizing” the listening experience by giving people control over the stems of a song.

In music production, a “stem” is essentially a piece of a song. The drums of a song can be grouped together into one stem, while the bass tones and vocals might form their own respective stems. There is a common misconception that a stem is just one individual element (track) of a song, but this isn’t true. A single stem can also be a mix of separate elements, such as a combo of orchestral strings and guitar sounds. When all these stems are layered over one another, they come together to form a complete song, also known by producers as a “final mix.”

Ye’s Stem Player now makes it easy to physically remix any song in real time by playing around with the stems. The device can divide any song into four stems (roughly split up as bass, vocals, drums, melodies), which are loaded onto four touch-sensitive sliders that light up when playing. With these slides, the listener can manipulate the volume of each stem or completely isolate stems. Want to hear a song without the vocals? Just slide your finger down that stem and you’ll get just the instrumental.

The Stem Player is also capable of more complex functionalities. Pressing one of the player’s side buttons changes its mode of operation, enabling you to use the sliders to slow down or speed up the song’s tempo, reverse the song, or add effects like reverb or fade. Simply holding down the center button also creates a four-bar loop.

Donda 2

While the Stem Player’s functionality is a point of intrigue, what really raised eyebrows in the music world is that the only way to listen to Ye’s new album, Donda 2, is by purchasing the $200 Stem Player. For Kanye, the decision to keep the album off all streaming services is a protest against the petty fees that the likes of Spotify and Apple Music award to artists. Per stream, an artist makes somewhere between $.003 and $.004.

“Today, artists get just 12% of the money the industry makes,” said West, who apparently ripped up a $100 million contract with Apple Music ahead of the Stem Player’s release. “It’s time to free music from this oppressive system. It’s time to take control and build our own.”

Kanye has a point. It’s laughable how little artists earn off streams. That said, most fans are struggling to see how the Stem Player will “free music from this oppressive system” when the thing is priced at $200.

“Man we broke what makes you think we'll spend 200 on this just for an album,” said one Kanye fan on Instagram in response to the Donda 2 announcement.

“sounds dope. looking forward to hearing a free leak online!” said another.

First Impressions

They say first impressions are everything and in that sense the Stem Player is winning. Its look and feel is nothing like the devices we hold every day. You wouldn’t caress your iPhone for pleasure, but the Stem Player is a different story. Even if you don’t turn it on, simply holding it feels relaxing (a little Google search revealed that the creators at Kano had stress balls in mind when designing it).

After holding in the ‘power’ button on the side, the Stem Player’s sliders light up with reddish-purple hues and the device vibrants in my hand for a moment. Cheeky. I was secretly hoping the designers would have their silicone-skinned device vibrate to match its sex toy vibe—and they certainly delivered. Haptic feedback, in fact, comes with every touch.

The padded, pantyhose-colored case of the Stem Player

Time to give it a spin. I press the central button and the album’s opening song, True Love, starts to play. Whereas the look and feel impressed me, the audio does not. The built-in speaker sounds about as good as an old Nokia. It’s clear that the makers expect you to plug in headphones or an external speaker.

As I browse through the album, I’m initially impressed with how cleanly you can isolate the stems of the Donda 2 songs. Even if some of the melodies are at a similar high pitch as some of Ye’s auto-tuned wailing, you won’t hear any overlap in those frequencies when you isolate just the vocals or just the melodies. As for the effects, those were wildly mediocre. Sure, you can easily give songs a whole new feel by switching up the tempo, but adding echo, for example, only drowns the song in feedback. Effects are done best when you can fine-tune different aspects, but without a screen or knobs, there’s no real way to do that.

All of this isn’t to say that I don’t like the Stem Player. I honestly love it. I’m a big fan of its sensory nature and screen-less interface. I like that you can reverse-engineer a track by stripping stems one by one—and that it responds to you as you do so. I like how hazy the lights look beneath the Stem Player’s “skin”. It feels so casual, so friendly. But as much as I appreciate how the Stem Player has introduced me to a new, softer realm of technology, it still feels like a 1st-gen gadget that is far from being a real asset for music producers.

Splitting your own uploads

Donda 2 was mixed in such a way that each song is split smoothly into four individual stems, but how would it handle non-Kanye productions? To test the Stem Player, I uploaded a personal production of mine made in the style of Detroit Electro. It’s not hip-hop, but it does share similar trap elements to some of the Donda 2 numbers. Regardless, the Stem Player chopped it up like a blind butcher with a thick knife. When I tried to isolate the bass stem, all that could be heard was some garbled low-frequency noises from various parts of the track. When I tried isolating the beat, you still heard glitchy bits of vocal samples and melodies. It seems the Stem Player’s AI tries to split songs into low, medium and high frequency stems, and then creates a mysterious fourth stem made up of whatever frequencies fall in between the cracks.

The problem is that this is far from how producers create stems in the first place. The vocals and the percussion, for instance, can easily share similarly high frequencies even if they are different stems. So when you try to isolate the stem of a non-Kanye song, the Stem Player will likely bring along some unwanted fringe frequencies from other parts of the song.

I thought that Stem Player might have more success with a simple boom-bap hip-hop track, but that wasn’t the case. When isolating the vocals on Slick Rick’s All Alone, it sounded like I had put his voice through an old cell phone, with random frequencies poking through as he rapped. Not great, especially considering that I had to go on stemplayer.com to upload the track and wait 5 minutes for the AI to do its work only for the Stem Player to vomit a lesser rendition of the song.

For me, the Stem Player would be worth $200 if it were able to handle the user’s music in the way it can handle Ye’s Donda 2. Nonetheless, I have a soft spot for the Stem Player. I dig its sensual design and its attempt to bring a more active role to listeners. And while it may not be justifiable to spend $200 on an imperfect piece of technology, those $200 could be justified when you recognize the Stem Player for what it is: a sexy piece of music history.

But that's just like… my opinion man. To give this thing a proper review, I need the opinion of bossman Diego Molina. Diego’s what I like to call a serial kool-aid drinker: someone who will always buy the 1st generation of any brand-new piece of technology, regardless of the bugs that so often come with 1st gen tech.

Interview with Diego

"My first thought is that the Stem Player would have killed it in 2004. The thing I do love is that it looks like some sort of dildo. That whole Cronenburgian vibe…the skin-tone cables…I really dig it. I think whether it sounds nice or not or whether its interface is cool or not is a little bit irrelevant."

Ivar: "Because it's a first generation product?"

Diego: "No, because it’s a consumer product. This is not made for audiofile. The music quality is just good enough and the interaction with it is like a fidget spinner. Daniel said it and I agree with his insight: it’s a really expensive fidget spinner. I like this fidgety interaction it gives you while listening to a track, kind of like smoking a cigarette: at least you’re doing something with your hands. I think what is stronger than the fact that this is a music device that lets you play around with the stems is that it’s an addition to the Yeezy brand. Like what does it do when you add a technical product to a company that’s also making clothing, making shoes, that is on the echelon of perceived value? I don't think there's any other brand, maybe Off-White or something like that that has this mass pop appeal, that has this amazing way of just implanting itself in pop culture and yet being utterly unaffordable for most people."

"The Yeezy brand collaborates with Adidas and other brands and then suddenly comes out with a tech product. And I feel that it is a really relevant hint to a future that’s coming very soon. A future explores this intersection of fashion and technology more and more. And I think that that’s the big thing that’s coming. The Stem Player might be a one-off, crazy, little toy but in essence it's a hint to things that are coming and to worlds that haven’t really collided with each other yet, but you feel it coming like when the iPhone became a fashion accessory."

Ivar: "Right. But what do you feel about the actual design of it?"

Diego: "Irrelevant."

Ivar: "Its functionality?"

Diego: "Irrelevant. Music quality? Irrelevant."

Ivar: "But that’s just one aspect of it?"

Diego: "The Interaction is irrelevant. The interaction, the AI…"

Ivar: "So that it just exists is enough."

Diego: "Yeah that's the point."

Ivar: "And that it exists still makes it worth $200, for… anyone?"

Diego: Yes. Because for $200 I can’t buy Yeezy shoes, but I can get a working electronics device. It is literally the cheapest way to buy into the Yeezy brand and you get music with it! It's cheaper to get a fully engineered device with literal gold inside of it, than to get Yeezy shoes that are made in Bangladesh. Think about that. You get a lot of value if being part of the Yeezy brand is the point for you."

Ivar: "The shoes are ugly though."

Diego: "So is this device. It is objectively ugly."

Ivar: "I actually like the way it looks. I genuinely think it’s…"

Diego: "Yeah but it fits also your sense of aesthetic"

Ivar: "Nah that’s not…"

Diego: "It’s as cool as your shirt."

Ivar: "Really... just because it’s a similar color?"

Diego: "It’s as cool as your pants. It’s as cool as your shoes..."

Ivar: "What I like is that for me it was the first introduction ever to a softer, more human realm of technology, outside the sex toy. That it’s poking at this new realm of 'this is actually how electronics can feel in the future.'"

Diego: "But don’t you agree then that the reason why it feels and looks that way is because it is aligning with the fashion industry. Because this is actually what it’s doing."

You can customize which colors pair up with which song on Stemplayer.com

Earforce review

For a final verdict, we gave a demo of the Stem Player to our friends over at Earforce, the Amsterdam-based studio where Popcorn Brain loves to record audio. The following is an edited transcript from our demo session with Thymen Geurts (composer), Madoc van Zalk (film production), and Maurtis Colijn (podcast specialist).

Ivar: "Is this the future of music listening?"

Madoc: "I think it might be just the beginning. It matches with this desire amongst people for having more choice. Today a song is constantly the same once it’s finished and that’s how people like it, but in the future it might just be that people like the same track in different ways based on how they manipulate it. That’s the interesting part."

Maurits: "Honestly, at first I was pretty skeptical, but now that I have it in my hands, I think it’s very cool. The silicone thing feels good. It’s a bit weird but I like it. We might be looking at a product that creates a whole new way of presenting music. I mean, it would be very expensive for artists to design and develop their own devices, but still I could see other artists doing something like this as a way of presenting music."

Diego: "Exactly. Imagine you’re going to a client and you want to present some music. You can go with your laptop or your phone, but it’s also pretty pimp if you say ‘Hey client, listen to this’ and then show off your music with the Stem Player."

Thymen: "What I’m feeling now is: yeah, it’s cool to mess with a track and add reverb or make a loop, but I don’t think people are waiting on this. These features make it fun for me—I get to be a little crazy with the track, make loops, reverse, whatever—but for the people who aren’t controlling the device, it’s just going to get a bit annoying. Other people in the room will be like: Doe is even normaal. So that playfulness is fun for whoever is holding the Stem Player but I’m sure everyone else listening will be thinking “can’t you just let the track play as it’s supposed to.'"

Madoc: "I agree. It’s more of a solo thing rather than a party thing."

Diego: "What I’m curious about is: for who do you think this product is for? Is it more for amateur producers or audio experts?"

Thymen: "We already have the izotope plug-in which is good at splitting songs into stems, so that makes one of the main functions of the Stem Player less interesting for real producers. I can definitely say that I appreciate that it exists. I know for certain that if I give it to my son, he’ll spend the whole afternoon playing with it. Would he continue to play with it? I don’t know. But it is a really cool gadget that teaches you how a beat is put together. It’s a good way of schooling people."

Madoc: "I think the Stem Player is good for the casual listener. If you are a producer then it’s just going to be much better to work through a computer. But if it’s for pleasure—like sitting in the train with your headphones—then it’s perfect."

Reviewing the Stem Player with the Earforce crew.

Thymen: "I have a friend who actually bought it. Not because he thought it was interesting as a device—he’s like us and already has access to these types of functions—but he bought it because this is going to become a collector’s item. He thinks they won’t keep making these and that as a hip-hop lover, he now has a collector’s item."

Diego: "Well I can tell you about another collector’s item that is similar but not worth a cent. Do you remember the Microsoft Zune? It was Microsoft’s response to the iPod. The Zune also had this sort-of silicone case to it and they made the color poop brown. It failed. It’s sort-of a collector’s item but a painful one."

Thymen: "Interesting. What I’ve been wondering is: if it feels like skin, why did they choose to make the Stem Player a lighter shade? Why didn't they give it a darker tone perhaps?"

Ivar: "Diego and I were wondering about that choice. It’s a bit in between a light and dark tone. Honestly, it’s a bit like Kim Kardashian in its tone and considering this is Kanye..."

Everyone in the room: "Ohhhhh. That makes sense."

Ivar: "Anyway, is it worth $200?"

Madoc: "Not for me."

Thymen: "No, but we’re also the professionals here. We’re more quick to drop $3000 on a quality pair of speakers."

Maurits: "No. For $100 more you can get Ableton, so I’d say just do that if you want to make music."

Diego: "You say that, but the computer that you install Ableton is going to cost a lot more so in a way, it’s actually a more low-barrier way to get into production."

Madoc: "I do really like that it helps you get to know music better. And it is nice that you can turn the bass a bit louder, or remove the vocals. This ability to choose is pretty cool."

Diego: "These are functions I’d honestly love to have on my TV. Sometimes I just want to be able to hear the dialogue better and turn down the sound of all these aliens destroying the city."

Madoc: "Thinking way ahead you might have the functions of the StemPlayer in Elon Musk’s neuralink, so that you could just have a thought about the vocals being softer and then it happens automatically. Basically in 20 years every mix will be perfect for you because your mind will automatically adjust it for you."

Diego: "Dude, that’s the future. I think we can conclude with that as a final statement. The Stem Player is just a step towards the perfect Neuralink listening experience."

Popcorn Brain Unboxes: The Yeezy Stem Player