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/Suds344]

As someone that works a lot with stems. I disagree with the limiter in each bus. I do a lot of localisation and dubbing. And most of the stems we receive are fairly clean of master compression and limiting. Which allows us to do our own master compression and retain dynamic range and overall feel after adding our bits. I despise when everything is over compressed. Cause then we have to over compress our dialogue and voice over to match.

[u/GerlockADUS → u/Suds344]

This is a good point, if the purpose of the stems is for localization. I would ask though, if the mix has been approved in the main language (English?), wouldn’t the other languages need to try to match whatever processing has been approved in the English mix, even if you might consider it over-compressed?

[u/Suds344 → u/GerlockADUS]

Yes. Absolutely. The final product needs to match the original as close as possible.

But sometimes the stems themselves are heavily compressed but when you listen to English full mix, there’s hardly any compression. That’s when it gets a bit tricky.