what is stems.
stems is an audio unit that plays the part you don’t have a player for. it loads inside the daw, listens to the take, and a band forms around it — drums, bass, melody, vocals — on your grid, in your key, as plain audio. no text box. your song, finished. not the machine’s.
lowercase. heavy. tracked tight.
the wordmark is set in a heavy grotesque at weight 900, tracked −.06em, always lowercase, in paper on ink. it never gets an icon, a container, or a tagline bolted to it.
paper (or bone) on ink. clean, or with the resting split.
no uppercase. the mark whispers; the music is loud.
no dark drop shadows. the split is light or it is wrong.
no loose tracking, no light weights, no monospace display.
red and cyan are ghosts,
never paint.
the only color in the system is chromatic aberration: two light copies of the mark — bone mixed toward red and bone mixed toward cyan — screen-blended at ±.009em at rest. every few seconds the split zaps wide to ±.024em for 150ms, then snaps back. quantized, then gone.
css: color-mix(in srgb, #E9DCC2 40%, #D9534F) ·
mix-blend-mode: screen
tight, light, horizontal. fringes hug the letterforms.
never flat red or cyan fills — on the mark, on buttons, on anything.
warm monochrome. four tones,
two ghosts.
no blue. no orange. no accent color. hierarchy is tone, not hue.
two voices: the slab and the label.
-apple-system, system-ui, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif
· mono: ui-monospace, "SF Mono", Menlo, monospacegrain, slips, and film.
grain rides above everything at ≤5% alpha — the ink is printed stock, never dead pixels. every 9 seconds, two or three page-wide bands slip a few px with red/cyan edges, for a third of a second. everything glitch is quantized: it lands on a beat and leaves.
film is black & white, slightly pixelated (4px blocks), no audio. real rooms, real hands, real hardware — never renders, never stock.
lowercase, terse, honest.
we state what is measured and say what is rough. no “revolutionary”, no “ai-powered”, no exclamation marks. if a sentence can lose a word, it loses it.
there are exactly three taglines. no new ones.