From the “Downloads” section of Kristen Hersh’s web site:
Every month, CASH Music brings you Kristin’s newest recordings in several formats including lossless audio. For each song, Kristin also provides lyric sheets and a “Works in Progress” demo version of each song. Kristin also offers her songs to the CASH community in “Read-Write” format — by making available her Pro Tools mix stems!
Very clued in: periodical small releases of one song in an interactive format rather than irregular large releases of many songs on a static CD.
I can’t do a remix because I don’t have Pro Tools but I did play guitar along with the MP3 and it was fun. And I found that by engaging directly with the music I actively enjoyed Kristen Hersh’s work for the first time, so there was clearly a promotional effect.
The ProTools download turns out to be a folder of .wav files that all line up with the beginning of the song, so importing them into Logic (or Garageband or anything else) is easy. Hopefully I’ll be posting my remix soon.
I worked with Kristin’s husband for a while on a web project. It’s no surprise to see this coming from her, she’s been blogging for a long time and has the kind of supportive fan base who don’t seem like the type to take the music without giving something back.
That gives me an idea for a remix to open up the file format — a zipped folder of .wav files that you can line up with the beginning of the song in the editor of your choice.
A set of wave files like that is a great idea to open up the use of the samples to all sorts of things. I’d read a bit about kristin hersh getting a bit more interactive and open source, and now I’ll go check this out.