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Mastering from Stems

Jun 14, 2018

Stems can be very useful in mastering. Basically stereo components of the mix, they allow the mastering engineer to make finer adjustments, for instance to de-ess the vocal without affecting the whole track.

If you're going to bring stems to the mastering session, make sure they're all starting at the same point and they're all at unity gain (when you add them together at the same level they make the mix). Also they each have their effects as they would be in the mix. In other words, when you run off each stem, just mute all the other tracks that you don't want included in that stem and bounce to disk.