Garry Schyman – The usefulness of music stems

In video games sometimes they hire you for 60 or 100 minutes of music, but they need 300 minutes of music and they don’t have enough money to have it all written originally. It's very common to deliver things in lots of different stems so that they can take your music and make different cues out of it. When I worked for Sony I delivered every stem I created separately. Sometimes it’s dozens and maybe as much as 30, 40, 50 stems. Sometimes just one or three stems of a very complex cue can create a very interesting, sparse, bit of music. If they're very familiar with the material and they get really into the weeds with it they can generate a lot of different, interesting cues.