December 20, 2021

Shred with Green Day, with some help from AudioShake

Jessica Powell

When I was 16, I spent an entire summer listening non-stop to Green Day. My parents’ car didn’t have a working CD player, so I borrowed my dad’s dictaphone, and listened to the band’s older albums, Kerplunk and 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, on mix tapes, as I drove around suburbia, hitting rewind and play over and over again.

So you can imagine my teenage fangirl excitement when I heard that the 30th anniversary of Kerplunk was approaching, and that the album’s original master tapes were long lost. Green Day asked AudioShake to bring the individual tracks back by using our AI to create vocals, drums, guitar, and bass stems, so that their fans could shred alongside the band.

Check out Billie Joe playing along to “2000 Light Years Away,” which was recreated by summing up AudioShake’s vocal, drum, and bass stems. The audio doesn’t have the guitar stem, so Green Day fans can play that part themselves!