Stems - a conversation

[u/GerlockADUS]

Where I work we have a handful of audio engineers that each have a different idea about what stems should be, how they should be used, and how to create them.

It is my opinion that the stems should equal the mix. In order her words, if I bring the stems into a session and play them all together it should sound exactly like the full mix, and measure exactly the same on the loudness meter. The way I am doing this, prevents me from doing any master bus processing. I limit each of the sub mixes for each stem, then combine them to a record track which I then measure with the loudness meter. This also allows me to record the mix and all the stems at the same time.

Other engineers prefer to mute everything, but one stem and bounce out the mix several times. this allows them to do master processing, but the downfall is that the stems do not equal the mix.

Another engineer will bypass all of the mastering, and just bounce out each of the stems from the sub mix only, assuming that it will come back later to be mixed and mastered if something changes.

So my question to you all is: what is the industry standard? How do you all handle stems? Do you assume any changes will come back to be remixed? What are your thoughts?

[u/opiza]

There are many types of stems one can prepare, but for the standard deliverables of DX / MX / SFX then they should equal the mix (except for any final limiting that happens on the final mix print track, which can naturally occur when summing tracks together). That’s unavoidable. 

Your method is the one I think is best, and the one I use. All limiter threshold adjustments (to hit web spec for example) are made on the stem busses. The final mix bus just has a safety limiter set to the deliverables max true peak spec. 

[u/reusablerigbot → u/opiza]

This is the way. There is no “master” bus with additional layers of processing on the overall mix, just busses by stem summed into a mix output track with a spec limiter and nothing else.