Introducing Grit
Grit is a live stem-mashup instrument for Mac. It splits your tracks into parts and lets you play them against each other, on the beat.
Most DJ software is built around a simple idea: one track follows another. You beatmatch, you blend, you move on. That model has carried dance music for decades, and it is still the right tool for a long night of records.
Grit starts somewhere else. It is built for the moment when the drums from one song sit under the bassline of a second and a vocal from a third. Not one track after another, but several tracks against each other, live.
What Grit is
Grit is a stem performance instrument for Mac. You give it your music, it pulls every track apart, and you play the parts.
- Up to eight decks. Load tracks side by side. Every detected section of a track becomes a pad you can fire in any order.
- Stems on tap. Switch each deck between Full, a cappella and instrumental with one key, or toggle drums, bass, vocals and other parts one by one.
- Launch quantize. Hit a pad early and Grit waits for the next beat, bar, four bars or eight bars before it lands. Free mode fires immediately.
- Scenes. Capture the tempo, the playing sections, the stems and the mix of every deck, then recall all of it on the next boundary.
- Key Sync. Pick a master key. Connected decks follow it with the smallest possible pitch shift, and a minor track finds its relative minor. Keylock keeps tempo and pitch independent.
- A proper mixer. Three-band EQ with full kill, a low- and high-pass filter per deck, a crossfader you assign per deck, and headphone cueing on a separate output.
- Keyboard scratching. Eight tempo-synced scratch patterns under Shift, with half and double speed on hold.
- Controllers. MIDI Learn for the controller you already own, and a ready-made preset for the Akai APC40 MK1 with pads, LEDs, knobs and faders.
The full list of keys lives in Support.
How it works
Grit has three steps, and only the last one happens on stage.
1. Import
Drop in files or whole folders. Grit reads WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis and M4A, and finds tempo, beat grid, key and phrase-aligned sections. Sections start on a phrase, downbeat or beat, so a pad always lands somewhere musical. If the analysis is unsure, the track is flagged for review instead of guessing quietly.
2. Separate
Every track is split into drums, bass, vocals and other parts. This happens on your Mac, with Apple's MLX on Metal. Your music is not uploaded anywhere.
3. Perform
Load tracks into decks and play. Fire sections, switch stems, bring in a vocal on the next bar, kill the low end of one deck while another takes over. Everything is tied to one session clock, so launches stay in time no matter how many decks are running.
Why it exists
I wanted an instrument, not a playlist. Mashups and live edits usually mean hours of preparation in a DAW, and the result is fixed once you export it. Grit moves that work to the stage: the preparation is automatic, and the decisions happen while the music plays.
That also means Grit is not trying to replace the DJ software you already know. Use it on its own for a stem set, or next to your usual setup when you want to take a few tracks apart.
Where Grit stands
Grit is in final testing and not on sale yet. The app works end to end in development, and the remaining work is the kind that has to be done properly before anyone pays: signed and notarized builds, license activation in the app, testing on more Macs, and a round of listening checks.
Before that comes a private beta. Join the waitlist and we'll invite testers in small batches; downloads, feedback and bug reports run through our Discord.
The plan for the launch:
- Two personal Macs per license.
- All Grit 1.x updates included.
- No subscription and no license key: you sign in with your purchase email. A future major version may be a paid upgrade; the version you buy stays yours.
Grit needs an Apple Silicon Mac with macOS 14 or later. The download page has the details.
Try it now
You do not have to wait for the Mac app to hear what Grit does. The playground on the home page is a simplified browser sketch of the idea, with four Creative Commons house tracks. Launch sections, switch stems, move the crossfader, and the audio follows. It is not the app: it runs on Web Audio, not on Grit's native engine. There is more about how it works in Inside the playground.
Follow along
Development notes go into the changelog, and new posts appear here. Both have RSS feeds if you want to know when Grit is ready.