Guidelines for Bouncing Track In To Stems to send us to perfect.

We have been professionally mixing and mastering our clients music since 2012. We can turn your flat and muddy tracks into professional sounding productions within a very short time ready to be played in the club or simply uploaded to streaming services.

A stem mixdown is the process of bouncing all the channels in your song to individual audio files. These are then combined into a single track again by a mixdown engineer, such as our own in-house mastering engineers.

Below we have some basic guidelines to follow when exporting stems for each instrument, vocal and other channels in your project. It is using Ableton Live as the example DAW but these instructions are pretty universal and should be easy to replicate on most other DAWs like, Bitwig, Logic and Fruityloops.

This guideline is to be read through before you bounce your tracks to stems in order for the Mix Down and Master to be carried out by us.

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BEFORE BOUNCING

Channels/Tracks

• Levels – Ensure there is no “red-lining” or “clipping” occurring at any point during the track. The best way to check this is to play the track from start to finish and keep your eye on the volume levels of each channel and the master. If anything is going into the red then this needs fixing.
  Bring the levels of all channels down equally so that there is enough “headroom” in the track to avoid any clipping (note: apart from the Master Volume which should always be set at 0)

• Label – Make sure each channel/track is labelled effectively, so the engineer will easily be able to identify what the track is. (Kick, Bass, Low Pad, Hi Pad, Hats etc...)

• Effects – RETAIN all effects you have used on each channel. This includes Delays, reverbs, EQ and compression. If for whatever reason we require you to remove an effect on a certain sound we will be in touch to arrange this.

• Panning – RETAIN all panning you have put into your track

Bus/Return Channels – If you have “Bussed” or “Sent” your channels to a 'Bus' (Logic) or 'Return' (Ableton), then these will need to be bounced down as well.

Master Channel – The volume fader for this should be set at 0db. Like with the individual channels this should never “red-line” at any point of the track.
There should be no processors or audio effects on the master channel whatsoever (e.g. Compressors, EQ etc).

WHICH STEMS TO BOUNCE

Where possible we recommend GROUPING certain sounds together to prevent there being over 25 stems in your track.  You may have already done this in some areas such as percussion, where you have used a virtual drum rack/machine in your DAW to host multiple percussive elements. This is fine, however we recommend at least having the KICK DRUM separated out from any drum groupings you may have.

As an example, we recommend something along the lines of this;

1. Kicks

2. Basses

3. Mid percussion (claps, snare)

4. Other percussion loops

5. Hi percussion (hats, rides)

6. Pads

7. Stabs / Chords

8. Strings

9. FX

10. Busses / Return effects

If you have several closed hi-hats for examples on separate channels, try to group these into a single channel to save on the number of final stems you have to send over.

EXPORTING THE STEMS

1. Once you have the stems prepared you can export (bounce) the stems out. Depending on your DAW this may vary in terms of method, but essentially you need to export the individual channels into their own WAVS.

   Format – WAV

   Sample Rate- 44100

   Bit - 24
    

2. Save the stems into a new folder named ([Your Name] – [Track Name] Stems).

3. Compress the folder and send via wetransfer.com or filemail.com to DECLOAK.MCR@GMAIL.COM

A word about groups, groups within groups and Send and Return tracks with regards to the “All Individual Tracks” option on the Ableton Live Render page. This feature allows you to bounce all of your tracks at the same time. However, if you have a group, the channels within that group will be exported as well as the summed audio. Likewise if you have groups within groups you will have copies of similar or identical content. This is why we advise summing part of your composition by instrument type/frequency band. Once you have done this is it then much more simple to highlight the area you want to export, then select each group and use the “Selected Tracks Only” option from the ‘Render Track’ drop down menu. Unfortunately you can not select the Return tracks at the same time, so once the fist bounce is complete, select all return tracks and repeat the process and name this stem “send effects”.

Need more help? Then how about having us mix down your track and master for you? You can also gain our knowledge with out Attended Mixing Sessions, where we will mix down your tracks and show you how we achieve a professional finish.

If you have any issues please contact us via the above email address with your query, or contact us here.