Create perfect separation & clarity between instruments
Make things LOUD with less damage
In this video, Fab Dupont breaks down how to set your session up to stem mix and then walks you through his mix of The Arrows Prisoner where he dishes tricks on making louder and clearer mixes.
Stem mixing is one of the best ways to gain flexibility and bigger picture control over the shape of a mix as a whole. Become a pro at managing your mix’s dynamic range and deliver radio-ready mixes.
Fab shows you how working in a stem mixing workflow has the added benefit of distilling a HUGE session down to just 8 channels that he can alway keep at his fingertips.
Plus when it comes time to print a performance track or create a Live session for the artist, his work is already done - no re-routing or repetitive bouncing necessary.
Pay close attention to the details in the routing that make Fab's setup incredibly powerful and easy to use.
P.S. Don't forget the most important detail of them all: always color your stem tracks Baby Blue.
00:00:07 Good morning children! Today
we're going to talk about stem mixing.
00:00:11 Wait! Don't go, I'll rephrase...
Good morning children.
00:00:15 Today, we're going to talk about
a way to make your mixes louder
without losing any dynamic range,
make them radio ready,
and find new workflows so you can work
faster and more efficiently.
00:00:25 You're staying? Thank you!
Here we go!
First, let's listen to some music.
The song is by a band called The Arrows,
from South Africa, they're fantastic.
I produced and mixed this record,
and I picked this song
because it's an epic session.
00:00:38 It's got lots of effects everywhere,
crazy drums,
electronic and acoustic drums,
it's pretty wild. Let's listen first.
00:01:58 Epic session, indeed...
00:02:00 Now, what's stem mixing?
Good question! Thank you for asking.
00:02:04 Stem mixing is actually derived
from film mixing,
where film mixers have hundreds,
and hundreds of tracks.
00:02:09 To make it more manageable,
they downmix a bunch of stuff together,
like for example,
all the sneezes on a Sneeze stem,
all the door slams on a Door Slams stem.
00:02:19 For us, imagine
all the drums on a Drums stem,
all the basses on a Bass stem,
all the vocals on a Vocals stem.
00:02:26 Why do that?
For us music mixers,
imagine grouping all the drums together,
all the basses together,
all the keyboards together,
all the vocals together,
basically making groups of instruments
that you can manage together
and try and glue together.
That's the principle.
00:02:43 Then, you take all those stems,
and you mix them together
to make your final mix.
00:02:48 So drums go into a Drums stem,
bass into a Bass stem,
guitars, vocals, and all those stems
get mixed down together
into a 2-track mix.
00:02:57 Stem mixing is different
from analog summing.
00:03:00 You can use stem mixing
with analog summing,
or you can also use stem mixing,
mixing in the box.
00:03:06 The difference is what happens
to your stems post stem mixing.
00:03:10 Either you send your stems out
to your converters
for a regular analog summing workflow
that you can see in many pureMix videos,
or you keep your stems in the computer,
into a 2-track for recording,
for in the box mixing.
00:03:23 Let's look at this session
as a concrete example,
so that your head can stop hurting.
00:03:27 If you look here, in a lovely
baby blue color, you have your stems.
00:03:31 They're called Bass Drum Stem,
Drum Stem, Electronic Drum Stem,
Bass Stem, Guitar Stem, Keys Stem,
Lead Stem, Back Stem.
00:03:38 I tend to call them stems,
because they are... well... stems!
They're not subgroups.
They may smell like subgroups,
look like subgroups,
taste like subgroups,
but we're gonna call them stems,
because that's the kind of people we are.
00:03:50 We have subgroups elsewhere
in the session, let me show you.
00:03:53 If you look here, I had the good taste
to call my Bass Drum Stem...
00:03:57 Bass Drum Stem!
Now up here, the bus that feeds
the Bass Drum Stem Aux
is called Bass Drum Stem.
00:04:03 You'll notice that I have...
three bass drums
that go into one Bass Drum subgroup
called Bass Drum.
00:04:12 And that Bass Drum subgroup
goes to the Bass Drum Stem.
00:04:15 But I also have a triggered bass drum
to augment the sound of the bass drum
and that also goes
to my Bass Drum Stem.
00:04:23 Consequently now, if I listen
to the chorus of this song
with just that one stem on,
all I hear is...
00:04:31 You guessed it, the bass drum! Ok?
Let's do that again.
How about the drums? Let's look at it.
00:04:36 Here you see that from my snare drum,
all the way to my room recording,
everything goes to a Drum Sub,
which is right here.
00:04:44 I'm also using the Drum Sub bus
as a source for
my parallel drum compression right here,
with my trusty dbx 160 up here.
00:04:52 Those two subgroups are mixed together
and they go, guess where?
Into the Drums Stem!
I also have a parallel drum track
that I actually recorded
through a live 1176,
that's also going to the Drums Stem.
00:05:06 So if I go here and I press Play,
and I listen to just my Drums Stem,
I hear just the real drums.
00:05:18 Same for my electronic drums...
00:05:22 Etc, etc, etc.
00:05:25 So now we understand how it works.
So what's the point?
Well number 1, workflow-wise,
as you just saw,
it's really easy
to isolate instruments now.
00:05:35 Say if I wanted to hear
just the drums on that chorus.
00:05:37 There's 20 or 30 tracks of drums
with parallel processing,
and like electronic drums,
and acoustic drums, and...
00:05:44 you know, door slams or whatever.
00:05:45 In this particular case,
if I want to hear the drums,
all I have to do is
mute everything else here.
00:05:50 And press Play...
00:05:53 And I hear all the drums.
00:05:54 If I feel like checking the balance
between drum and bass,
I just open the bass.
00:06:02 I don't have to go search
through the whole session
to figure out where everything is,
because everything is right here.
00:06:07 This is kind of like "Grand Central"
of my session
and I can work from here
most of the time.
00:06:13 It's very good workflow-wise.
00:06:15 I have decided to keep it down
to eight stems
on all my mixes where I use this.
00:06:19 Why? Because I'm lazy,
and I don't like to mouse too much.
00:06:23 So I have integrated a system where
it's not that much distance
to click from here to here.
00:06:30 Minimal movement, and it fits
good on the screen
with my print track after that.
00:06:35 Also, keeping it down to eight stems
allows me to do a cool trick
with my control surface right here.
Let me show you.
00:06:43 How does one set this up?
I can show you with Pro Tools,
because that's what I use.
00:06:47 You have to go
into the EUCON Control Settings,
and to this page that nobody ever uses.
It's called the Assign page.
00:06:53 What it does is it lets you force
any fader on the MC Mix,
or even the MC Control,
to look at the same track all the time.
00:07:00 Usually, this is a dynamic process.
00:07:03 You click on somewhere in your session,
and everything goes "KrrrKrrr!"
In this particular case, I'm telling it
"Don't go Krrr! Stay where you are."
So I'm saying the first fader
on the MC Mix
should always show the Bass Drum Stem.
00:07:15 Then the next one, the Drum Stem,
and the EDrum Stem, and the Bass Stem...
00:07:18 If you have two EUCONs,
you can do sixteen stems.
00:07:20 Eight is enough, though.
00:07:22 Once you're happy with this,
you can say that in this window,
that even less people use,
called the Layout saving page,
and you just hit Store.
00:07:30 The magic thing is that Pro Tools
will recall this automatically.
00:07:33 Next time I open this session,
I don't have to come back here,
it's automatic, which is kind of nice
for lazy people like me.
00:07:38 Now, we see how it's setup.
What's the point?
Say I'm working on my drums.
I'm all the way to the left of my session,
150 tracks to the left away
from my stems. Alright?
Say I'm working on the chorus,
and I want to be able to hear
the difference between chorus
with and without bass drum,
or massage the relationship between
the bass drum and the drums.
00:07:58 Normally, I would have to go
fish in my session,
and click and stuff like that,
or go all the way back to the right
to my stems and mute the stuff.
00:08:05 With the control surface,
all I have to do is this: I play it...
00:08:09 and even though I'm looking at
the drums, I can just hit...
00:08:12 the Mute buttons here,
and I'm listening to just the drums,
or just the drums and the bass,
or I mute the bass drum and the drums,
and hear the relationship
between the bass, the keyboards,
and the guitars.
00:08:25 And that saves hours of mixing
on a big session. Hours!
Because you don't have to
navigate yourself
to go listen to
what you want to listen to.
00:08:36 That is the difference between
DAW mixing and console mixing.
00:08:39 On a console, your bass drum is
always, always in the same spot,
because it can't travel,
it's hardware.
00:08:45 So if you want to move your bass drum,
you instinctively reach for that channel.
00:08:49 On a DAW, you can't do that,
because it moves all the time.
00:08:52 You scroll... your bass drum is
no longer where it was ten seconds ago,
and that's a lot of mind share
to keep track of.
00:08:58 If you start working in stem mixing
and you do this,
your bass drum will always be
in the same spot,
and your reflexes will become as such:
Oh, the bass drum is too loud... Boom!
Your finger's on it,
and you take it down.
00:09:10 So I have decided to group my stuff
strategically for stem mixing,
so that I can have the instrument groups
I know I will need to massage together,
both for mixing, and for processing,
which we'll talk about next.
00:09:24 One more thing though.
Another benefit of this
is that since you have control
over groups of instruments,
you can manage the energy
of the whole mix much easier.
00:09:32 So for example,
say you want your chorus to lift.
00:09:36 How does one make a chorus lift?
I don't know, maybe you raise the drums
a little bit, maybe a half dB or a dB,
to make it feel more organic.
So how would you do that?
Very simply! All you do is,
if you already have automation,
and you can now have automation
on entire groups of instruments,
but in this particular case,
what I could do is do this.
00:09:54 Play the song...
00:09:56 and then when the chorus hits...
00:09:59 just move the drums up a little bit,
and record that automation,
which allows me to give the pump
and then come back down
at the end of the chorus.
00:10:09 I'll show you.
00:10:19 It's coming right now...
00:10:29 And I can come back to where I was.
00:10:31 I just raised all the drums
up a dB, a dB and a half,
by feel and listening to it,
holding three faders, in one pass.
00:10:39 I don't have to go
and automate little things.
00:10:41 I can raise entire groups of instruments
or lower entire groups of instruments,
offset the balances, do remix-like
breakdowns and stuff like that,
just by touching faders,
or working here on the screen.
00:10:51 It's very practical.
00:10:53 One last thing for the setup is you have
to make sure that your stems
are solo safed, like mine are here.
00:10:58 In Pro Tools, to solo safe,
you Cmd+Click on the Solo button.
00:11:01 In other DAWs or Windows, it's Ctrl+Click
or you can have Option+Click.
00:11:05 Because if you don't solo safe it, when
you solo something else in the session,
you'll hear nothing,
which is very frustrating.
00:11:12 Let's talk about processing.
If you noticed here on my stems,
I have a bunch of plug-ins on the stems.
00:11:18 If you use hardware, you can use
hardware, depending on how you roll.
00:11:21 Before I'm gonna hit my 2-bus, because
this is an analog summing session,
I'm able to process
every stem separately
depending on
what's going on during the mix.
00:11:30 For example in this case,
I have a bunch of Flux Epures.
00:11:33 I'm using them to shape the tone
of the different stems,
which means the different groups
of instruments, to my taste.
00:11:40 That probably happened
halfway through the mix,
or into the 4th or 5th revision
of the mix,
and I realized I was either
painted into a corner,
or I needed a little more energy
elsewhere, or the bottom was too fat,
or something was too aggressive.
00:11:52 If we want to look at it,
for example here I have the bass drum,
I'm high-passing the bass drum at 40Hz,
and I'm taking about a dB and a half,
two dBs at 60Hz.
00:12:01 Obviously I had a problem there.
I'm also bringing a little presence
at 5k, probably for the "Poink!"
Now that's the bass drum.
00:12:10 You could ask yourself, why doesn't
he go back to the bass drum track,
and do that EQing on that track?
If you remember,
the bass drum track is three tracks,
plus a triggered track,
and then the two of them are summed
and then they go into this.
It's much easier to do it here
and it gives me that sense
of togetherness.
00:12:25 For example,
I have a whole bunch of basses.
00:12:28 I would have to go to every bass
and high-pass them at 59Hz,
give them half a dB at 271,
and 1.87dB at 1089Hz.
00:12:37 Now, it would probably feel
very different
if I had to do that on every bass.
00:12:41 But the basses as a whole
can take this,
and it will put them together
a little more, which I like.
00:12:47 So, having a processing on the stems
allows me to consider those instruments
as sections, and help them fit
with each other better,
being in one location. That's number 1.
00:12:57 Let's listen to the track
with and without those EQs.
00:13:00 First with...
00:13:09 Without...
00:13:22 Listen to the bass drum
and the snare relationship,
and the bass relationship
with those two.
00:13:28 Without the correction, which
by the way is mostly high-passing,
you'll notice that the bass drum gets
cloudy and a little "Oom, oom."
Same for the bass. With the correction,
it gets a lot more legible.
00:13:39 Check it out. Without first.
00:13:52 With.
00:14:13 One more time. Check out the bass drum,
the snare drum and the bass,
but also the apparent loudness
of the whole track.
00:14:20 It's not supposed to change
the loudness, but it feels louder
once you high-pass the gunk.
Check it out.
00:14:44 Now without.
00:14:58 So that's one type of processing:
EQing to massage the tracks together,
gain a lot of energy back, in case
you have too much energy in the bottom
and you want to transfer it
elsewhere in your mix,
and alter the relationships
of the different stems together,
over the course of your mix,
or different versions of your mixes.
00:15:16 I mentioned earlier a way to make
your tracks mastering ready,
or loud ready, or radio ready,
or... well, you know what I mean...
00:15:24 Let's talk about that.
00:15:26 Incidentally on this mix, on the bass
drum I have a little bit of R-Bass,
which is a sub bass generator,
to make it go "Boom,"
a little more "Boom" I guess.
00:15:34 I also have an Oxford EQ on the bass
to add 2.74dBs at 60Hz, ish...
00:15:39 That is probably to compensate,
or take the place of,
the hole I made at 60Hz
on the bass drum.
00:15:46 And then here... I have a Tonelux
Pultec-style thing on the vocal
and I'm doing absolutely nothing
with it apparently,
it's totally flat.
So I don't remember why,
either I wanted to have
the tone of the transformers...
00:16:03 Or...
00:16:04 I wanted to try it, I tried it
and didn't like it,
and was too lazy to remove it.
I vie for option B.
00:16:10 Let's talk about the limiters,
the ones you have been looking at
since the beginning of this video.
Those, right here.
00:16:15 You'll notice that
there's a limiter on every stem.
00:16:18 And you'll notice as I open them
that they're all the same.
00:16:22 There's a very nice Pro Tools function
that lets you...
00:16:25 basically assign
a bunch of parameters to a group.
00:16:29 For example, right now if I bypass
one of those limiters,
they're all bypassed on all the stems,
which is gonna be great
to show you before and after.
00:16:36 Also, if I change a parameter
on one stem,
they change on all the stems,
which is very nice.
00:16:41 You can find that parameter,
you Pro Tools geeks,
in the Group function.
We'll make another video about that.
00:16:47 So let's find out what the impact
of those limiters is on our track.
00:16:51 First, let's listen with,
as you have from the beginning.
00:16:54 Listen to the bass drum, the snare drum,
and the vocal, as always,
and listen to that elusive thing
called the glue.
00:16:59 Does it feel all together?
Memorize that, so that
when I bypass the limiters,
you can feel the differences.
Here we go. With.
00:17:23 Without.
00:17:44 Interesting, isn't it?
I'm gonna play it again,
unlimited first.
00:17:48 Check out the bottom...
50, 40, 30.
00:17:52 If you are listening on your laptop
speakers, you're out of luck,
but then again, in general, if you are
listening on your laptop speakers,
you are out of luck.
00:18:00 When I turn the limiters back on,
right after,
listen to the bottom again,
and see how it tightens up,
and cleans up.
00:18:08 Why is it doing that?
It's because everybody is being put
in its own little box by the limiters.
00:18:13 Now if you look at the processing,
there's zero processing,
those limiters are doing nothing...
00:18:19 In theory! But I hear something,
you hear something,
we hear something,
I'm not Joan of Arc, it's not voices!
It's doing something nice.
00:18:26 And... if you look at the meter,
you'll see that not only do we get
a little tighter, a little cleaner,
and we gain one dB, or maybe
a dB and a half, in peak/average.
00:18:38 What's that?
Well that's the difference between
you average level,
which is how loud things feel,
and your peak level,
which is how loud things are.
00:18:46 If you're gonna try and prepare
your track to be loud
so that
your mastering engineer can make it
as loud as the whatever record that
right now rocks your boat,
you have to kind of prep the mix.
00:18:56 You can't just mix a way and then hope
for your mastering engineer
to do a miracle
without ruining the track.
00:19:02 It ain't gonna happen.
00:19:03 You have to think about your fellow
friend mastering engineer gentleman
and you have to prepare your mix for
his purpose, if that's what you want,
meaning,
making obnoxiously loud records,
which serves no purpose in itself
other than, well...
00:19:18 you know how to make
obnoxiously loud records.
00:19:21 That said, the more you limit
your peak/average,
in an elegant and non-destructive
manner, at the mix level,
the easier it'll be for your mastering
engineer to make the record loud,
without ruining it.
00:19:33 If you noticed here, what I'm doing is
I'm tightening up the bottom
very elegantly,
because of the tone of the limiter
and the little bit of squeezing it does,
and I'm getting 1.5dBs of peak/average
over the whole mix
while making it sound better.
00:19:47 Isn't that wonderful?
Let's listen to it again.
00:19:50 So first without.
00:20:07 And now with.
00:20:28 So obviously, the advantage of this
versus smashing your whole mix
with a limiter at the end,
is that you're doing this in sections
and you're doing a little bit of
limiting here and there,
as opposed to a whole bunch
of limiting on just the whole mix.
00:20:40 One of the problems of doing
a lot of limiting on a whole mix
to be able to do that prep,
is that when you have a big bass drum
hit in it, the whole mix goes down.
00:20:49 If you have one instrument
that has a big peak/average,
usually bass drum or snare drum,
it will compromise the whole mix.
00:20:55 If you do it this way, you can decide
exactly how much peak/average per stem.
00:21:01 In this particular set, I'm using
the same settings for everybody.
00:21:04 But I don't have to!
Say for example my snare's obnoxious,
I can limit this stem
more than the others.
00:21:10 So my whole drum set is gonna be
a little squeezier,
but everything else is gonna breathe,
so I'm not gonna get
as much of a squeeze.
00:21:18 It works that way.
00:21:20 I'm being fairly metrosexual
about the settings here.
00:21:22 I'm getting 1.5dB by using
basically no gain on my limiter.
00:21:27 What would happen if I were
to abuse the machine a little bit?
Since all my stems are linked,
I can say: okay, I'm gonna gain...
00:21:36 3dBs on the input, and you'll notice that
all the stems now have 3dBs on the input.
00:21:42 And then, of course,
so I don't fool myself,
I'm gonna lower the output by 3dBs.
00:21:48 Now for some reason in this session,
the Oxford limiter needed 0.7dB down
to be able to be unity,
meaning that the level is the same
when I bypass it.
00:21:57 So if I want it to be the same,
with 3dBs of gain,
I'm gonna probably start at -3.7dB.
00:22:05 Let's listen.
00:22:27 And as a reminder, without.
00:22:48 So you noticed that the mix is
essentially the same as it was,
but a little tighter,
a little more together,
and with a peak/average
reduced by about 2.5dB, or 3dB,
which is lovely for something that
did not ruin my mix.
00:23:00 Now how far can you go? Very good
question, thank you for asking.
00:23:03 Let's figure it out.
How about... 6dBs?
-6.7... without.
00:23:26 With.
00:23:46 That's too much for me.
00:23:48 Obviously, this level of compression
is not scaring a whole bunch of people
who get their tracks on the radio,
considering what I hear on there,
but for me, it's too much.
So I'll find a spot in between.
00:23:56 But you get the vibe. The vibe is this:
you can do this a little bit
on every stem.
00:24:01 If I wanted to, I could relax
the bass drum,
and relax the drums, I would get
that squishy vocal sound
that we hear a lot, and then
the drums still pumping in the front.
00:24:09 So now you have a palette here,
on these eight stems,
that can help you reshape your track
very easily, and completely,
with just a little brush stroke
here and there.
00:24:20 You'll notice that
there still is a limiter,
yet another limiter, on my 2-mix.
00:24:25 Because that is basically gluing
those 8 stems back together.
00:24:29 So we have the stems gluing
the stuff together,
and the coming together of those stems
being glued together by this limiter.
00:24:36 You could use all the limiters,
you could use more EQs, less EQs,
but that's the principle of stem mixing.
00:24:44 Another advantage of working this way
is the following... check it out.
00:24:47 Say your singer calls and says:
Look, I'm going to Jay Leno tonight,
I got the gig,
I need a TV track with no guitar.
00:24:57 You could go into the whole session
and find every guitar and every vocal,
or you just go to your stems,
mute the guitars... out!
Also very important for pop bands,
R'n'B bands or hip-hop bands
that play with tracks a lot, maybe
sliced up in Ableton Live
for their live show, when they want to
recreate the sound of the record on stage,
you can now stem the whole record,
meaning you can print the whole record
in stems very easily.
00:25:21 All you have to do is mute
everybody else, like this, hit Record...
00:25:27 You now have a perfectly phase accurate
version of your bass drum.
00:25:31 Then, you mute the bass drum,
you turn the rest of the drum set on,
you print again, and it's now perfectly
in sync with the bass drum stem.
00:25:38 Then, you print the EDrum set,
and so on, and so forth.
00:25:42 If you take all those stems
back into another session,
you're gonna get your mix.
00:25:45 They'll gonna be able to take
those stems, slice them up,
bring them into Live, or whatever else
they use, or their samplers,
and do a rocking show that sounds
exactly like their record.
00:25:54 Side note... If you really want
an absolutely, completely accurate mix
to be recreated on stage, I strongly
recommend you to have separated reverbs.
00:26:04 Meaning, if you're gonna use a reverb
on the vocal, only use it on the vocal,
so that when you print your stems,
and you print the bass stem,
you're not tempted to send the bass
into the reverb vocal,
which is gonna make
a bloody mess in your session.
00:26:17 Stem mixing is a good way to simplify
and essentialize your workflow,
make it easy to massage a track
stem by stem altogether,
and of course, the reason why
you watched the video all the way through,
a good way to make your record
ready for radio, or blatant mastering,
by keeping the peak/average
under control.
00:26:37 So go stem something!
Et voilà!
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Fab Dupont is an award-winning NYC based record producer, mixing/mastering engineer and co-founder of pureMix.net.
Fab has been playing, writing, producing and mixing music both live and in studios all over the world. He's worked in cities like Paris, Boston, Brussels, Stockholm, London and New York just to name a few.
He has his own studio called FLUX Studios in the East Village of New York City.
Fab has received many accolades around the world, including wins at the Victoires de la Musique, South African Music awards, Pan African Music Awards, US independent music awards. He also has received Latin Grammy nominations and has worked on many Latin Grammy and Grammy-nominated albums.
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Productivity can be clutch when you have tight deadlines. Thanks for making videos like these.
Oscar Gasch
2019 Aug 22
Hello Fab.
I just wonder if its possible to assign faders (like you did on Ucon) on hui protocol.
Thanks for all. Also for your sense of humor!
Urbini
2019 Feb 11
Hey Fab, great video, but still dont understand the difference between stems mixing and just using AUX s for each instrument and VCAs. Thanks!
ChuckSherwood
2018 Oct 26
Hey Fab, question regarding the routing to the stem tracks. I currently send most of the instruments to a rear bus aux for compression which is then routed back to my master bus processing. Should I leave the rear bus routing alone or do I need to have a “rear bus” for each stem?
Stephen Moniz
2018 Jul 23
One more question. So if your vox and or bass lets say or in Mono in the original tracks it is OK to make them stereo and wide on the stem as long as you follow the panning. And how does this affect the workflow using a dangerous 2bus+? Just make everything stereo on the 2bus+? Thanks!
Stephen Moniz
2018 Jul 23
Is there any benefit or difference of having the stems (or even subs) as a VCA Fader rather than audio track?
oceantracks
2018 May 09
Still confused about the need for a group, which then gets routed to a stem (aux).....
and it seems in PT you cant solo the stem , looks like you had to mute the other stems to solo something.
On a real console if you have a bunch of tracks routed to a group, can you just hit solo on the group fader?
Great an d entertaing video as always, thx!
mike.p
2018 Jan 15
Hi fab!
Would you be able to show us your setup one day?
I know that you may say ''it's not about the gear, but about the player'' but it would be interesting to learn what gear your started out with, and what you evolved to and expanded with, and also learning what the gear does, and why you have it.
for instance, you faders on the side, which are daw controllers, good for stem-controlling. I never thought of this, but when you mentioned this, I thought that it was genius.
Right now, I have some piece of gear, and I want to expand, and also learn what can help me along the way
Fabulous Fab
2016 Oct 07
@Styles: I probably wanted to be able to show with and without limiter in one click across the mix.
Styles
2016 Oct 06
Another great video!
I was wondering why all the limiters on the stems are grouped. Wouldn't you want to adjust the input of each stem to taste?
Thanks
Finnius
2016 Aug 27
What about using Oxford Inflator instead of the Limitier?
RBdwarf
2016 Aug 05
That was spooky. I sneezed and 2 seconds later Fab says "All the sneezes...", I gotta try not to scratch while watching these, apparently they're watching back! LOL
mghecea
2015 Oct 14
Excellent VID! I will have to watch again and again...It's that good! Stem Mixing...
GuitarLegend
2015 Sep 14
Still having trouble hearing the difference at 17:06 with and without limiters. I am listening through an RME Fireface 802 into Yamaha HS80M speakers, or Beyerdynamic DT250 cans. I even recorded that part of the video into the DAW so I could AB them and even the waveforms are absolutely identical between the with and without parts. I don't know what to learn from that. If you can hear something that I can't even see between waveforms, you must have superhuman hearing. By the way Fab, you are costing me a fortune in plugins and gear every time I watch one of your videos - and I love it :D
Fabulous Fab
2015 Aug 31
@Kelly777: 'Correct 'printing' means recording. By recording instruments with their processing in several separate stems one can basically have the record as a backing track for live shows, with the ability to mute whichever parts you like. (Mute the bAss is you have the bass player on stage, mute the drums if you have the drums, etc)
Kelly777
2015 Aug 25
Didn't really understand the part about printing the stems at the end for live use. Were you recording the bass drum stem to another audio track? You then went on to say you continue by "printing" the next stem----does that mean you record that track to a separate track as well, like the bass drum?
Very interested in the live performance possibilities, any help on that would be greatly appreciated!
Great video by the way, thanks!
pierre.vienneau
2015 Aug 13
8 is the key... like octatrack :p
Fabulous Fab
2015 Aug 03
@freewind1974:JUst print your stems thru the whole system. It'll work fine and sound great if you are not being too heavy on the 2Bus processing.
Fabulous Fab
2015 Aug 03
@duguy: I never dither I truncate. On the Sonnox limiter, no dithering and dithering to 24 bit is the same.
freewind1974
2015 Jul 28
PPLP_SMorse's question is interesting, I haven't figured out myself a way to use 2bus compression on stems yet. I sometimes print stems on heavy mixes to save CPU, and I do it pre-2bus processing. If I had to send stems out, ie. for stem mastering and such, and I wanted to use 2bus processing, I would have to find an alternative, besides not using 2bus processing at all. Any better idea?
There has to be a way though.
duguy
2015 May 26
Hello fab, i noticed that you keep the dithers engaged on your limiters to 24 Bits. What is the interest to keep the dithers when working on stems ?
Fabulous Fab
2015 Apr 23
@chadmauldin: You have to make sure you have the sneds probably activated when printing stems. Or you have to have dedicated reverbs ofr everytihng
chadmauldin
2015 Apr 23
Great video, but what do you do about reverbs if a client wants stems? Since they return on an aux, they won't be a part of the stem.
alexfree
2014 Dec 30
Brilliant! I hope the Mackie MCU can do the same!? //Alex
William Forrest
2014 Dec 29
J'aime la simplicité avec laquelle tu nous expliques ton workflow :) Merci Mr Fab.
I like the simplicity with which you explain us your workflow :) Thanks Mr Fab
ubustronix
2014 Dec 20
Merci de vos partages
vomit23
2014 Dec 20
subtitles french please :)
Il Pianista
2014 Dec 06
Great video as usual! Do you know how I can set up my Tascam US2400 in order to have a bank permanently attached to 8 faders as you did in the video? It looks like you have a dedicated menu on the top right corner of your window, but I don't! Thanks!
damianmusic
2014 Dec 03
I have one question. What about the reverbs. They go also to the stems track?
h2m
2014 Nov 29
Thank you very much. I will modify my mix template right now !
AndresDaniel
2014 Nov 21
Excellent video! Thanks!
Kace
2014 Nov 20
Thank you for teaching/sharing these methods Fab!
channaD
2014 Nov 14
Where can I find this song?
DrG.
2014 Nov 06
Extremely informative, you really have to be on your toes to follow Fabrice. I don't work with this many tracks... ever, but the concepts here are very useful.
PPLP_SMorse
2014 Nov 06
Hi Fab, what do you recommend to do about mix buss compressor(s) when printing individual stems? I use those a lot for overall tone of the mix and sometimes as the glue (which you already have a limiter for) and I think it would come out very different stem by stem instead of the whole track.
msloan
2014 Nov 01
great video FAB!....thanks for the info!
ManRoom Studio
2014 Oct 29
Excellent presentation and great information - as usual.
