David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust - Acoustic Mixes (1972)

Here's a type of album I've never posted before. (And note this is NOT the officially released version of David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" album as you know it.) It used to be one could never find multitrack mixes of songs. I'd never even heard of those being available. But that started to change with the "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" series of computer games, in which mixes were made of famous songs that separated out each of the major instruments, like bass, guitar, drums, vocals, and so on. Also, some music formats became increasingly popular, such as 5.1 surround sound, which effectively has four music channels instead of the usual two for stereo.

Thanks to these sorts of developments, sometimes it's possible to make mixes of songs where you can strip out one or more of the instruments. It's very hit or miss, and it becomes harder to find this sort of thing the further you go back in time, because the multi-track masters often were not saved. For instance, when a special Beatles version of "Rock Band" was made in 2007, there were no multitrack versions of Beatles songs. They had to be created using special new audio forensics technology that had only recently been developed, and that took many months and lots of money. In the end, such versions were made for only about 70 Beatles of the 200 or so original Beatles songs.

When it comes to David Bowie, there aren't many of these multitrack mixes available now, but one great exception is the entire "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" album. Perhaps because that's such a famous and classic album, it got special attention. In any case, since these exist, and since I'm a big fan of stripping music back to reveal the acoustic core of songs, I edited these multitracks to create versions of each song that primarily just feature Bowie's voice and guitar. The result is essentially an alternate acoustic version of the album, allowing you to hear it in a new way, and hopefully notice little things you'd missed before.

Note that I was limited by what was on the multitrack channels. In some cases, there was some bleed of some other instruments into the channels I selected. For instance, you might get a little bit of bass on one song, or some drums on another song. But every song is stripped way down, and sounds quite different from the well-known official versions.

By chance, my source material also included one bonus track, "Sweet Head." So I tacked that onto the end. From what I understand, the multitrack mixes of another bonus track, "Velvet Goldmine," should also exist. But I haven't been able to find that one. If anyone has it, please let me know and I'll add it in.

I'm very curious what people think about this, and if you like it. If you do, and let me know, I could post more stripped versions based on multitrack mixes in the future.

This album is 42 minutes long.

01 Five Years (David Bowie)
02 Soul Love (David Bowie)
03 Moonage Daydream (David Bowie)
04 Starman (David Bowie)
05 It Ain't Easy (David Bowie)
06 Lady Stardust (David Bowie)
07 Star (David Bowie)
08 Hang on to Yourself (David Bowie)
09 Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)
10 Suffragette City (David Bowie)
11 Rock 'N' Roll Suicide (David Bowie)
12 Sweet Head (David Bowie)

NOTE: The download link has been removed, due to a copyright issue, sorry. But check the comments below.

Just as the music here is similar to the released "Ziggy Stardust" album, but different, the cover used here is similar to that album's cover, but different.  There was a photo session that resulted in the official cover, and somehow a bunch of outtakes from that session have been made public. I picked one of the outtakes, then added the usual text in the upper left corner, and further added the words "Acoustic Mixes" there.