COMPLETE ABLETON LIVE GUIDE TO

CREATING STEMS

HOW TO MAKE STEMS FROM YOUR TRACKS

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INTRODUCTION
COLLABORATING WITH STEMS

Sometimes to collaborate with other musicians we need to turn our Able-

ton Live Tracks into Stems. Using stems is a great way to send tracks to
other people that use different DAWS, such as Logic, or for remix contest.

This PDF will go over everything you need to know about turning your
tracks into stems. Before we get started though, lets define what a Stem is.

Stem-mixing is a method of mixing audio material based on creating

groups of audio tracks and processing them separately prior to combining
them into a final master mix. Stems are also sometimes referred to as sub-
mixes, subgroups, or busses.

In other words, its taking our track and turning it into a handful of stereo
tracks. That way you can send 8-10 tracks instead of 50 individual tracks
or one final master.

CREATING STEMS CHECK LIST

ON THE LAST PAGE

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ORGANIZE YOUR TRACKS!

ADD SOME ORDER TO THE CHAOS

I cant tell you how many times I have gotten a track and spent hours fig-
uring out what the hell was going on. I find instrumental tracks in a drum
group, or 10 unnamed tracks I need to figure out what they are in the mix.
By spending a little time as you go, or at least 10 minutes before you send
the file to someone you will save them a lot of time.
CHAOS

ORDER

You can see how the Chaotic one would be a lot harder to work with than
the ordered one. By having the sounds in groups it would be easy to turn
all the drums on and off, and so on. Things also sound better when they
are organized.

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Here is a checklist you can go through to organize your tracks.

Delete unused tracks

Rename all tracks by their character or instrument
Add similar tracks into a group

Color the Tracks and Groups in a way that helps organize

Try coloring all Glitch or Bass sounds the same color
Erase any extra content you dont need
Over the years I have found 8 to be my lucky number. I like to separate my
tracks into 8 groups. This will also make soloing them for stems a lot easier
later on. Image below demonstrates how I separate my tracks.

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SOLO THE TRACK

HOW TO EXPORT YOUR AUDIO
Now that we have the tracks organized we are ready to export our tracks. I
have found the easiest way to do this is to solo the tracks you want to ex-
port. If you solo a group it will play everything found in the group. You can
also solo one or more individual tracks.

Select the full range of the track you want to render. To do this click and
hold while dragging across the arrangement view. This will then highlight
that area. When rendering Live will render only the selected area.

It is best to set your peak level at about -6db. This

will insure a lot of headroom. If your mix does not
already have -6db of headroom you can always turn
down the master volume from -3 to -6db to give
your track the needed headroom.

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EXPORT SETTINGS
Now that we have selected the parts we want to export we can export the
track. To do this we must go to FILE > EXPORT AUDIO AND VIDEO.

This will bring up the export options.

The first option should be set to Rendered Track: Master. This is why we
grouped and Soloed the parts. Since that is what is played over the master
out, that is what will be rendered. I prefer this over All Individual Tracks
because that will bounce every group, track, return, master, and so on. for
me that will give me over 70 stereo tracks. By soloing you can pick the 8 or
more tracks to render.

I also set the tracks to Bit depth 24 and No Dither to insure audio quality.
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RENDERING ALL THE TRACKS

Now all we need to do is solo the tracks and render them all out. I will gen-
erally do this 8 times to make the 8 tracks stems I need. Here is an example
of what my 8 stems will look like when rendered.

ADDING NOTES:
To help out your fellow musicians and collaborators you might
want to make notes on the actual track. What I like to do is make
a simple .txt document the info below and send it with the stems.

BPM:
Scale/Key:
Notes:
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CREATING STEMS CHECKLIST:

TRACKS ARE ORGANIZED AND GROUPED

MASTER OUTPUT IS AROUND -6DB PEAK

SOLO TRACKS FOR RENDERING

SOLO THE GROUP OR INDIVIDUAL TRACKS

SELECT FULL RANGE OF THE TRACK

EXPORT AUDIO

RENDERED TRACK MASTER

SAMPLE RATE 44100 AND BIT DEPTH 24

NO DITHER

RENDER OUT ALL STEMS

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