Many bands have their singles leaked in advance of their release dates, but this is the first time we can think of that a band has managed to get other people to cover a song before the recording of it has even been leaked, let alone released.
Deerhoof posted sheet music on Thursday for its unreleased single "Fresh Born" from the album Offend Maggie (October 7, Kill Rock Stars) under a Creative Commons license so that other bands can record cover versions and share them on Deerhoof's CASH Music page. So far, six covers have already been recorded and posted.
Lucas Gonze made it easy for those who don't read sheet music (or don't want to bother) by transcribing the sheet music into MIDI and posting MIDI and MP3 files for anyone to apply sounds to using a wide range of music creation software.
He writes, "(I)t's easier to work with this stuff if it's digitized, so I
retranscribed their source into Sibelious. Given that, I was able toauto-create a MIDI file for the whole thing, an MP3 file for the wholething, and parts for each instrument including guitar tablature, sheetmusic, and a MIDI file for each instrument so that you can feed themall into a sequencer and tweak each one individually."
You can check out the sheet music and remixes here.
(Thanks, Cameron)
