We’re excited to announce a great new Soundslice feature that many people have requested: the ability to add multitrack stems to your slices.

As a slice creator, you can now upload individual stems for a recording — that is, a separate audio file for each instrument or voice. Then anybody viewing your slice can control the playback volume of each stem individually.

Here’s an example you can play with, a guitar duet of “Auld Lang Syne.” (Old-school Soundslice users will recognize this as one of the first slices, which used to be embedded on our homepage.)

Open the player settings at lower right, then look for the new “Multitrack stems” section. Click that to toggle stem playback, and you’ll see the available stems. This particular slice has two stems: the lead guitar and rhythm guitar:

As soon as you enable stems, playback will use the stems instead of the original audio. Both are set to 100% volume by default, but you can change their volume independently.

All of our player’s usual functionality works seamlessly with stems, including looping, slowdown, speed training, metronome playback, focus mode and synth overlay.

Why are stems useful? For example, you can use this to:

• Mute all parts except your tenor part in a choral piece so you can focus on learning it
• Mute the lead guitar part, leaving only the rhythm section, essentially creating a backing track
• Reduce the volume of the piano by a little bit, so you can play over it but still hear it as a reference
• Boost the volume of a part you’re trying to hear, but keep all of the other parts audible
• Mute everything except the instrument you’re transcribing, to really hear the details

We have two new detailed help pages on how to use stems. Here’s information on using stems in the player, and here’s information on how to add stems as a slice creator.