Ableton Forum

Hello,

Forgive me if this had been discussed already. I searched and couldn't find the answer.

I was recently contacted by a singer whom I had remixed his song for and he is asking for the stems so he can have it professionally mixed and mastered by his own choice. He liked the arrangement and he wants to keep that intact. But thought the mixdown could be better. I did the original mixdown myself and agree it's not one of my strongest points. It was actually a quick, down and dirty mix to make the deadline.

I have 26 tracks on the arrangement. 10 of those has some volume automation and most, if not all, has some sort of insert effect and sends. Would you strip off all effects and level all the volumes to 0dB for a completely dry session? Would you do two types of exports, one that is dry and the other with maybe just the volume levels intact and a separate track for the sends?

Would appreciate any reply.

Usually you would strip off all volume automation and print a complete set of dry tracks. If you have effects that you think will be useful to the mix engineer, you could print those separately (not the sends, but the outputs from the fx).

"Stems" usually means submixes and not all the individual tracks. For example, there might be a bass stem, background vocal stem, drum stem, etc. On the other hand, submix stems are more usual for mastering or for making backing tracks, but not so usual for a from-scratch mix. So you might ask them to be specific about that, whether they want all the tracks broken out or whether they really mean "stems".

Setting faders at 0dB to do the bouncing is fine, but be sure of course that there are no clipped levels, i.e., nothing inserted in the tracks themselves that bumps the gain up over 0dBFS.

hth,

-Luddy

make sure you render with you output set at -5, Keep all drums separated, that's a nice way to keep the Mix Engineer happy. Also its best to keep all stuff that is Mono (Kiks, Bass, Snr, ect) exported as mono. As for effects I render out all efx sends separate so the mix engineer can use what he need and ditch any extra crap that doesn't fit, or he may replace with ultra-expensive outboard gear.

roach808 and luddy,

Thanks for the insightful replies. When you say render the efx bus seperate, do you render each track or all together? Say I have 2 guitar tracks sent to one delay effect, do you render seperately or all together? I'm pretty sure he wants seperate tracks not submixes (stems) coz it is a mixdown from scratch.

If the person wants original tracks, he should state that, it is understood that stems are submixes of groups of instruments, such as guitars, drums, vocals, backing vox, synths and weird/FX noises etc. Roach made a good point though that often they prefer at least a seperate kick and snare on a drum submix for extra control.

If Live had .omf (which it doesn't), you could just export the .omf which would save you having to render a ton of files or stems.

With regards to FX, what I usually do is send it dry, because they will probably want to do that part themselves but send a stereo mix that has all the FX added as a reference and some screenshots of plugins I used and their settings as jpegs.

FrankieP wrote:roach808 and luddy,

Thanks for the insightful replies. When you say render the efx bus seperate, do you render each track or all together? Say I have 2 guitar tracks sent to one delay effect, do you render seperately or all together? I'm pretty sure he wants seperate tracks not submixes (stems) coz it is a mixdown from scratch.

I tend to record all my efx track. Allow me to explain....
For starters, I used to own one of these:


the easiest way for me to get it into live was to record a totally wet take of whatever sound i was sourcing thru that unit, then just mixing into my tune as another audio track. I used to do the same thing with my old lexicon reverb units. You can do when you export live, it will do it for you actually when you export all tracks when you render the project.

Anyho, this trick works best of delays, reverbs...stuff of that nature. Or it fun if u have a mono synth lead, and then u buss the sound out to a fat stereo chorus. thats another great reason to have the efx on another channel from the original sound. Leave the sound mono sound rocking in the verse, then mix in the stereo chorus during.....well the chorus. Anyho, i digress.....hope this helps somehow.

just want to say that this thread really was/is great advice for me.

thanks!