Fortnite Festival update lets you resurrect Harmonix’s Fuser by adding solo jam loops
The game’s music-mixing feature can now be played alone, giving a Fuser-like experience
The latest update for Fortnite Festival has added a new feature which lets players make jam remixes on their own, essentially resurrecting Harmonix’s previous game Fuser.
The ability to remix tracks has been available in Fortnite for a while now via the Fortnite Festival Jam Stage, but this has always been a collaborative process. The game’s latest update makes it solo for the first time.
As in Fuser (and Harmonix’s short-lived NFC board game Dropmix), the idea is that players can create their own remixes by taking the Jam Tracks (songs) from their library and mixing them together.
Each song in the game is made of numerous ‘stems’, each representing a different instrument. Most songs have separate stems for vocals, lead guitar, bass guitar and drums. These are the tracks players control when playing Fortnite Festival’s main mode (which is very similar to Harmonix’s Guitar Hero and Rock Band).
On the Jam Stage, however, players can mix these stems by placing down separate stems from different songs. For example, they could place the vocals from Sabrina Carpenter’s Please Please Please over the drums to a Metallica song, along with the steel drum melody from Crank That (Soulja Boy) and the bass from a Rage Against the Machine track.
The game then takes these stems and changes the tempo and tone of each in an attempt to match their beat and harmony. All going well, the resulting combination can make for interesting new remixes.
Until now, the Jam Stage has been a purely collaborative feature, with each player working with others to contribute individual stems to a shared song. This proved frustrating for some players, who didn’t want to rely on others’ musical ear when it came to making their own remixes.
Now, with the addition of Fortnite’s version 34.40 update, players can finally make their own remixes by setting up their own jam. By using the emote button and choosing a jam loop, players can then assign their own instruments and stems to four separate tracks on their own.
Other players can still join in and change the players’ tracks, but those who want to make their own remixes without disturbance can resolve this by playing a mode that allows for private play (for example, the lobby of Fortnite Festival Main Stage when No Fill is activated).
Fuser was released by Harmonix in 2020, but in December 2022 the game and its DLC were removed from sale and its multiplayer servers were shut down.
