What Are Stems?

Stems are like sub mixed tracks. Let's say you have your guitars, vox, bass and drums sent to different buses. If you mixed those buses down so you have one track with all your guitars, one with all your drums, etc... those are stems.

At least that's my understanding of the term.

Stems are nothing more than sub mixes. In Sonar buses can be used to create them by outputting similar tracks to the same buss.  For example guitars go to the guitar buss the vocals go to the vocal buss and so on. 

To make the "stems" simply export the buses to their own files.  

OK it seems everyone can type faster than me. 

Thanks for all the insight!  So..... I would expect that importing into X2 would just be a standard audio file import?  No complications with a Pro Tools file format or anything like that?

You shouldn't need OMF to import stems. Just make sure that the start point is the same for each stem. Or if PT will let you, use broadcast wave files. To get OMF in PT requires an add on that is not cheap. 

Sounds like good advice, but when times are tough you do what you have to do!

Good one CJ. OP, different studios use stems very differently. On the one extreme, you might have a stem of "all vocals / no band" and another stem for "band but no vocals". (Sometimes called a 'TV mix' for karaoke style use on live TV.) Sometimes it is (as described above), guitars / keyboards / drums / bass / vocals. On the other extreme, some studios do stems for vocals - vocal reverb stem - b-vox - bvox reverb stem - guitars dry stem - guitar FX stem (you get the point) and on and on. Can be as simple or complex as needed. PS, some love them, but some mixers hate stems because the impact to master buss type compression is quite different with just one "section of the band" passing through it vs. the entire mix. YMMV.

I worked across the net recently with a guy using Pro Tools.... I sent him a standard wave mix, he loaded it into PT and recorded the vocal track. He exported the vocal track as a wave and sent it back. I loaded it up and mixed it...everything worked flawlessly. We never discussed formatting. 

My understanding of stems is that they are simply tracks in your project. As Mark said ^^^ in post #13... just film and TV speak for what we call tracks. They can be mixed down in any manner. Dropping the vocals from a tune, dropping the drums and bass.... all for the purpose of keeping the same song playing under a scene (underscore) with perhaps less energy and drive as dialog happens on screen....maybe just the piano stem would play, then the entire song comes back as the scene changes..... 



I think CJ's definition was the most accurate one.... all other things aside. 

A stem can be anything. But basically, its a group of tracks that are bounced into one track and in most cases that track is a stereo track.

You can have Stems for all your drums, vocals, guitars, strings, and any other instrument group. This is the most popular way and those stems can be used for mixing and/or mastering, You can get creative with sterms as your imagination goes.

I do not like to use stems for mixing or mastering. Because you lose control over the individual instruments when its in a stem.

Cj

Stems are used in music and film. 

For international films, you want music/effects/dialogue separate in delivery, so you can dub in foreign languages.

For music remixes, you might get the beds broken out in stems (bass, drums, guitars, fx) and lead elements separate (vocals, lead guitars or tuba, etc.).  It makes it easier to remix w/o going back to the mix.  Many times you won't have any effects printed (or maybe on a separate track(s) so the remixer can do their own thing.

The term has been expanded to include (mostly) analog mixing, esp. summing mixing.  Since analog hardware is usually limited in comparision to software, a mixer will use soft plugs on many individual instruments/tracks, bus those to stems, which are then treated w/ the hardware units in analog.  Guitar bus/stem, vocal, drums, etc.  Some engineers will do low/med/hi frequency stems so they can treat those elements of a mix, rather than traditional bus elements.

Stem is short for something branched off - think of an upside down tree.  Leaves are tracks, branches are stems (or buses), and the final mix is the trunk.  If is a general, nebulous term that everybody in a project is hopefully using the same.

@

One complication that can arise from simply exporting your busses and calling them a stem is what do you do with your reverb/delay busses?

Do you export these individually as a "Reverb Stem" or would you incorporate their contribution into, say, the guitars or vocals stem?

Hey Dave,

You can search for some re-mix competitions going on and download stems provided, drag and drop them into Sonar to try it out before ya go.

The session you are attending would be a neat opportunity to take an original song broke down in to your class and see what the difference in the mixing will be compared to what ya have at home.

As i said before, it depends in what environment.

In his first post in hios thread he made, he said he's using Sonar and wants to mix and master, so we already know the enviroment, its Audio in Sonar, Not Film or TV