Creating stems is a task film and TV composers are frequently called upon to

deal with. There are plusses and minuses to this: The good thing is that because

the director or producer and picture mixer can decide which elements to use and

how much to use of each, you may be less likely to have a cue mixed so low that it

is inaudible or dumped altogether. The bad news is your musical intent can be

totally distorted. Oh well, it comes with the territory.

How many stems? They will tell you. In a poorly budgeted project, they may only

want a stereo mix simply because they do not have the budget to pay for the

increased amount of time more stems requires the picture mixer to deal with. My

favorite scenario is to give them a stereo mix with one or two additional stems

that I have any concerns about being problematic for them when adding my

music to dialog, like a melodic instrumental solo or high percussion, like hi-hats

and shakers. Even though I am experienced and like to think I know how to do

this without competing with dialog, experience has taught me that this is safer.

However, even if you are not a media composer, mixing from stems is a great

way to go that I recommend, particularly if you are doing complex orchestral

simulation.

Heres why:

Presumably, after you have entered in all your parts you spend a fair amount of

time balancing, panning and automating within sections of the orchestra, like

your strings for example. Ditto for brass, woodwinds, percussion, and rhythm

section. If you are using a lot of different libraries to create your palette with lots

of articulations, you may have as many as two hundred tracks. Typically, I have

about sixty for this kind of work because I use a fair amount of software

instruments that have patches with multiple articulations that I choose with key

switching. As they say in internet-speak: YMMV (your mileage may vary.) As you

no doubt know, mixing all this is the black hole of time. But let us say you are

now at the stage where everything is in the ball park.

Now you are ready to fine tune your intricate masterpiece and maybe add more

plug-ins. In my case, I use a lot of UAD plug-ins that I wait to add at the final

mix stage because they are latency-inducing. Adding these can play havoc with

my balances between the sections. Maybe I am content to put the same plug-ins

on a whole orchestra section, like an EQ or a compressor or, in my case, the

new UAD Studer A-800, which I have fallen in love with.

Either way, wouldnt it be easier to do your final mixing and automating with

five aux tracks instead of perhaps sixty software instrument tracks? In the words

of a prominent female political figure: You betcha.

Pic 1. Here you can see the woodwind instruments I am composing for in this

piece.

Step 1 - Reassign the Output

Now I want to send them all to a bus which will be hosted by an Aux channel

strip. This is really easy to do as Logic Pro 9 will do most of the work for us.

In Pic. 2, you can see that with all the woodwind software instruments selected, I

navigate to the output assignment rectangle and change it from Stereo Output to

a Bus, in this example, Bus 10.

Pic 2. The

Mixer

In Pic. 3, notice that Logic Pro 9 created an Aux with Bus 10 as its input which I

subsequently renamed and colored. Now I can make my woodwinds louder and

softer, automate the woodwinds mix, insert plug-ins, etc. to make it work in the

overall mix, all with this one aux, without disrupting my previous work.

Pic 3. The Winds and Output channel strips

Step 2 - Repeat the Process for the Other Sections of the Orchestra

Following the same procedure, I create Auxes assigned to ascending bus inputs

for my brass, strings, percussion, and rhythm sections (see Pic. 4).

Pic 4. Repeating the process

This is fantastic! I can now hide all the other tracks in my Arrange window if I

like and only work with these five aux tracks to fine-tune my mix (as you can see

in Pic. 5).

Pic 5. Aux tracks in the Arrange area

But I want to create audio stems noweven if I do not have to deliver them. To

do this I can save my project under another version number and get rid of all the

software instruments and any FX plug-ins that may be on them. This frees up my

CPU power for any CPU-intensive mix plug-ins I want to use, allows me to raise

my audio buffer for more CPU power without caring about the latency (that

would have bothered me while playing the software instruments) and, if I am

using a slave computer, it will no longer be in the picture. When I am doing my

final mix, the fewer things I need to think about the better I do.

Step 3 - Create Audio Tracks for the Stems

Once again, Logic Pro 9 makes this so easy: All I need to do is click the plus sign

at the top of the Track List and tell Logic to create five stereo audio tracks with

ascending inputs, record enabled, as you can see in Pic. 6.

Pic 6. Audio

tracks for each stem

Step 4 - Record the Stems

After adjusting the projects length to the proper amount of bars (or drawing in a

cycle), press record and now you have five stems. At this point, if it is going to a

mix engineer you can simply send them to him or her or, if you are the mix

engineer, start mixing. If this is a film or TV project you now will have the length

of project stems that they may require.