Part 1: Interview with Geno Hinton – Creator of MuteSolo
A stem player breaks a finished song into its layers and hands you the controls. Here's how it differs from AI vocal removers — and why official stems sound better.
Music - we all love it. No matter the genre that moves you, there is always a song, an artist, or album that speaks to your soul. Now imagine taking a song and engineering it in a way that makes it uniquely your own. When I say engineer it, I do not use the term loosely. I mean separating the actual stems (tracks) - vocals, drums, keys, guitar, bass, strings – the building blocks that make the record what it is. There are endless ways to reimagine this recording and give fans and artists a new listening experience.
At the moment, the only people who can do this are studio engineers with access to a multi-track player (stems). Imagine if you had that capability – not from behind a studio mixing board, but right from your streaming service or your phone. Think about what that would mean for your favorite playlist the next time someone at a get-together says, “Anybody want to play DJ tonight?”. You would be the talk of the group chat when you showcase your skills while using a live remix app – not just a DJ mixer app. Are you getting excited? I know I am – and not because I would be, but because, to quote the legendary musician and visionary Prince, “I have seen the future and it works.” The future is here and I had the privilege of sitting down with the man bringing it to us one track at a time, Geno Hinton, the inventor of MuteSolo.
Who is Geno Hinton? He is a musician, a music connoisseur, an audio engineer, and a bit of a mad scientist. Geno even compares himself to Gene Wilder’s character in the movie Young Frankenstein and MuteSolo is very much his creation. During our interview, as he prepares for the global release (end of May 2026), he laughed and said, “It’s alive!” And quite frankly, MuteSolo has the potential to become the monster that the music industry never heard coming down the castle steps. But, with MuteSolo you will be able to rearrange the sound of those footsteps to a rhythm you love and others may appreciate.
Geno has logged more than three decades behind a bass and inside recording studios, long enough to witness every trend, every tool, every late‑night breakthrough that shapes a musician’s life. Even with all that experience — and full access as an audio engineer — one limitation kept showing up: every great idea required a trip back to the studio. Inspiration moved fast; the workflow did not. That changed in 2021. While listening to Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, Geno found himself wondering what the track would sound like if he could pull it apart in real time — extract vocals from the song, rearrange a groove there, rebuild the song’s DNA on the spot. The technical skill was already in his hands. What he did not have was the freedom to do it anywhere.
That question became the spark. The kind that does not fade after a session ends. The kind that pushes an engineer to turn a curiosity into a concept, and a concept into a tool. From that moment, MuteSolo stopped being an AI stem separation idea and started becoming something bigger than a mashup maker app. It became reality — a portable, creative engine built for musicians and casual fan who want the power to reshape sound wherever inspiration hits – from stadiums filled to the rafters or Friday night karaoke sessions with the kids. The first question Geno had to answer was simple on the surface but massive in impact: Has anyone ever created a stem separator app before? If there was a stem player app, what happened with it — and if they had not, why not? That is how a creative mind works: one question opens the door, and suddenly you are standing in a hallway full of them. The bigger question, the one he knew mattered most, came next: How do artists earn from this? Geno was not interested in building a novelty mobile DJ app. He wanted MuteSolo to shift the soundwave landscape not just become the latest karaoke maker app — especially not at the expense of the people who create the music. Artists needed control of their intellectual property, and they needed a way to earn that did not mirror the razor‑thin split rates of streaming. Right now, musicians are leaving fortunes on the table because of how streaming divides revenue. Geno’s vision flips that dynamic. With MuteSolo, Gino is aiming to level the playing field and give artists a new lane to profit from the creativity they already own.
Eugene Avalon for Spoon-Fed Media
http://spoonfedmediacom.wordpress.com