Hi All!  I'm sort of embarrassed to ask this question, but.....here goes!

I will be taking some training in a pro studio soon and one of the options is to be able to take the session "stems" back home to my own studio where I can apparently mix, produce and master them.  The idea is that then I would send my final product back to the instructor for critique.  I'm thinking that this would be very enlightening.  The studio is a Pro Tools shop.....is the term "stems" a Pro Tools term or file type unique to that software?  If so, does anyone know if I can import it easily into SONAR X2?  I'm thinkin' that this has to be referring to the raw tracks which I would assume would just be some kind of audio files?  I sniffed around for a thread on the forum that might help but wasn't able to turn up anything.  Can anyone shed some light on this for me?  Any and all commentary will be appreciated as always!


Dave

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 like sub mixes. A final mix may contain guitars, vocals, keyboards, drums and percussion. The stems are the stereo mixes usually of just one area on interest such as all the guitars in a stem. All the percussion in another etc. Many tracks may be used to create a stem such as 8 percussion parts but they all get pre mixed and onto a single stereo sub mix called the Percussion stem. In the above example there would be just five stems to mix at the end. eg a guitar stem, vocal stem, keyboard stem, drum stem and percussion stem. Vocals are often separated into further stems. Lead vocals and harmony vocal stems. This means you can process those two stems differently.

The stems have to be well balanced within themselves. If a stem consists of several tracks eg 8 percussion tracks, those tracks need to be well balanced feeding the stem. A complex mix can be cut down to just a fewer number of stems.

If you don't like the way a stem is mixed you need the individual tracks in order to make a new stem mix. You should always get the complete multi track session to take away as well as any stems. A good mix can be re created by just mixing the stems together in the right proportions.

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. 

You can also bounce tracks to stems in Sonar & keep working within the project, then mix those to a 2 mix source before exporting for mastering. 

You can even master that source mix within Sonar too there by keeping everything in the project.

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?

Well hopefully the PT file was save in the proper format to share with other programs. OMF I think is the preferred way. Unless maybe he's testing you on importing raw wavs and syncing them up. That thought makes me giggle. ;-)

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. 

What Are Stems?

They are the part of the plant that you do not want to smoke! I advise you clip off all stems.
 
Cj
 

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