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CREATING STEMS
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Subaqueous- Creating Stems
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INTRODUCTION
COLLABORATING WITH STEMS
This PDF will go over everything you need to know about turning your
tracks into stems. Before we get started though, let’s define what a Stem is.
In other words, it’s taking our track and turning it into a handful of stereo
tracks. That way you can send 8-10 tracks instead of 50 individual tracks
or one final master.
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I can’t tell you how many times I have gotten a track and spent hours fig-
uring out what the hell was going on. I find instrumental tracks in a drum
group, or 10 unnamed tracks I need to figure out what they are in the mix.
By spending a little time as you go, or at least 10 minutes before you send
the file to someone you will save them a lot of time.
CHAOS
ORDER
You can see how the Chaotic one would be a lot harder to work with than
the ordered one. By having the sounds in groups it would be easy to turn
all the drums on and off, and so on. Things also sound better when they
are organized.
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Select the full range of the track you want to render. To do this click and
hold while dragging across the arrangement view. This will then highlight
that area. When rendering Live will render only the selected area.
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EXPORT SETTINGS
Now that we have selected the parts we want to export we can export the
track. To do this we must go to FILE > EXPORT AUDIO AND VIDEO.
The first option should be set to Rendered Track: Master. This is why we
grouped and Soloed the parts. Since that is what is played over the master
out, that is what will be rendered. I prefer this over All Individual Tracks
because that will bounce every group, track, return, master, and so on. for
me that will give me over 70 stereo tracks. By soloing you can pick the 8 or
more tracks to render.
I also set the tracks to Bit depth 24 and No Dither to insure audio quality.
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ADDING NOTES:
To help out your fellow musicians and collaborators you might
want to make notes on the actual track. What I like to do is make
a simple .txt document the info below and send it with the stems.
BPM:
Scale/Key:
Notes:
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EXPORT AUDIO
NO DITHER
www.subaqueousmusic.com
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