How to Export Stems for Mixing

hey this is joe from presonus today i'm going to show you how to export stems to send to a mix engineer [Music] now this process can work if you're sending it to a mix engineer or if you're just sending files to someone else for collaboration and the first question you might have is why don't i just send them the studio one file good question a couple of reasons why i don't do that first of all even if the person well first of all they might not be a studio one user so they can't open a studio one file so that's useless so we need to send them just raw audio files that they can then import into their system that's the first thing second thing is even if you and i are using studio one you might be on a different version right you might be on version three and i'm on version five so you can't even open a studio one five file and if we're on the same version you might have different plugins than i do and specifically you might not have the same instruments that i do so if i send you a bunch of a session with a bunch of instrument tracks with midi information triggering drum samples and different keyboard sounds and things like that if you don't have the exact same instruments i do the exact same sample packs and all of that you're going to get a whole bunch of silence on those tracks and then we have to go back and forth and i've got to resend things to you it's just annoying it's not fun trust me don't do it so in my opinion one of the best ways to do collaboration is to simply export a bunch of audio files all the same length and then send those to whomever you're collaborating with or whoever is going to be mixing your project it's really that easy so in this video i'm going to show you the process for doing that step by step so you can see exactly how to set it up how to send it in a way that i found to be kind of the best approach when it comes to collaborating with other people over the interwebs all right i've got a couple of steps here for you the first is you need to remove if you're sending this to someone to mix you need to remove all the mixing plugins meaning any plug-ins that you've added to your session to you know eq compression things like that you know we tend to do some rough mixing along the way i want the mix engineer to make those mixing decisions this these are not decisions for me to make so i'm going to disable all of my mixing plugins in this song on these tracks so that the mix engineer can make his or her decisions that's just as a mix engineer myself i really appreciate it when folks don't send me vocals that have a bunch of eq and compression on them because then i can't do my thing with them right so studio one makes this really easy if you open up your mixer and you click on this little power button here it's at the very top of your mixer you may have never even seen this before there's a power button there that activates or deactivates all inserts we click that you'll notice all my plugins and my sends are now powered off and i can even it doesn't apply to the mix effects i'm going to turn those off manually as well or maybe it did i don't even know so now there are no plugins active in this session that does not include instruments i know we sometimes we use or we tend to use the word instrument and plug in interchangeably you can see all my instruments different instances of presence those are still intact so if i come and listen to these keyboard parts here we're still going to hear sound okay those have not been changed but all the other plugins have one thing to keep in mind i said to deactivate all mixing plugins that doesn't mean we need to deactivate things like empire so i've got some electric guitars over where do they come in they're in here towards the end and i used to get my guitar tone on these tracks i used empire here so i'm going to turn empire back on otherwise the mix engineer is going to get something that sounds like this [Music] that's terribly boring if i turn the plugins back on for this channel he's going to get this part of my tone there was this slapback delay i can choose to leave that on or not it's a little bit of a gray area if i'm recording electric guitar with an amp i'm going to have all my effects on the signal so the mix engineer is getting it with the delay and reverb that i recorded so typically i'm going to leave those on but i'm going to come over here and do the same thing on these guitar parts as well so those plugins are on but everything else is off the only other place where i might want to leave a plug-in on i think this whirl it sir yeah i had i think i had empire on here as well let me just check real quick [Music] [Laughter] [Music] okay i did have empire but that turned it way up i'm just gonna leave that off and we'll call it done all right so that's the first thing we've do we've removed all of our mixing plugins one thing you might want to do is use the save as function to save a new version of the song that's called something like export stems so you can always get back to your previous version but this one where you strip things down and remove plugins will be a separate just song file that tends to be helpful all right the next thing you want to do is come to song song setup and click on the general tab and just take a quick note of what the sample rate and resolution of your song is you're going to want to export these same settings there's no reason to convert from 48 to 44 1 or from 16 to 24 bit we want to export exactly what the files are so there's minimal amount of conversion happening so i can see i recorded this at 44.1 and at a resolution of 24 bit so just write that down file that away remember that for the next step next we're going to come to song export stems keyboard shortcut is command shift e and that opens up this window this window gives us a lot to work with so let's dive in and take a look first of all you've got these two different source options for both tracks and channels channels has to do with the entire signal path of that piece of audio so if you've created you know this audio feeds into a bus and there's a bunch of cool effects happening and you want to export all of that with the effects intact you'll want to choose channels however for mixing i recommend just using tracks as you can see right now only the kick drum is selected so we're going to select all and we can scroll down and see that all my tracks including my instrument tracks you can see these right here these are all my instruments they're all selected and ready to go so now we move into this middle section where we want to export them this is fine it'll default to the stems folder inside of this project folder okay that's fine with me and file name prefix i prefer not to put a prefix on there that means literally like the kick drum file will be joe dash kick you can do that if you want if you want to put the file name there i prefer as the mix engineer to just get it where it says kick i'll put the name of the song on the the folder or something like that so i usually leave the file name prefix empty publishing if you have a presonus sphere account you can actually go ahead and it will upload all the tracks to sphere when you finish with this window if you don't you can just have it export to a folder and then we'll get to what to do with that in a second format here i always use wav files 24 bit 44 1. this is also corresponds to the format and resolution and sample rate of the files as i recorded them as i showed you just a second ago so that's going to stay in place next is export range this is important to get this right you can go between the song start and end marker but one thing i like to do is make sure that i'm exporting from the downbeat uh of the tempo of the song because if uh if this is for a collaboration and that person's gonna play along and record more then i want all the tracks that i send to that person to start at the very same section easy way to do that if your session's not super long is to just move the start marker all the way back to the beginning essentially to bar zero now when they receive the tracks there's going to be you know 13 15 bars of blank information at the beginning that's no big deal but then if they're collaborating and they send you tracks back make sure they send them starting from the same point and when you drag those tracks into your session pull them all the way to the left they will line up perfectly with everything else in the session so let's go back to that window everything like we selected let's say between song start and end marker that works we can see that our song is four minutes and eight seconds nailed it preserved mono tracks i would check this so for things like vocals my electric guitar or maybe not an electric guitar but vocals a bunch of mono tracks in this session i don't need those to be stereo real time processing no right tempo to audio files i don't see why not um it doesn't really matter if i'm sending it out to mixing but it's there and close after export don't import to track don't overlap and i say okay and now studio one gets to work exporting these essentially one at a time and once that's done it's gonna pop up and say here are all your files once that happens i'll come back and tell you what we do next okay i'm back quick aside that process took fifth i wrote it down it took right at 49 minutes to do and that's not an indication of studio one being slow or anything like that it's literally soloing each track and rendering a mix down so it's the equivalent of in this mix doing 39 mix downs um but the good news is you can set this up go have dinner come back and it's done you don't have to go through and solo each one which is the way things worked years ago right you had issues there um however there is a quicker method if if all you have are audio files if you only have audio files you can just select everything with the range tool and then drag it into a folder over here in the files browser so i could literally just hold it right there and it will render it i can press command to swap between these two options it can render it as a wav file or as a wav file with the rendered effect so if i want to export it with the rendered effects it can do that problem is or just the the thing with that is if you try to do it with midi tracks or instrument tracks you can't uh because they need to be rendered through their instrument in real time which is where the export stems feature can be handy uh if you transformed all of this to audio files then you could do that but that's gonna you have to do each of those one by one so it starts to be more time consuming potentially so i still think the export stems is the simplest way to get where you want to go and the final result is this now problem is when i showed you that i like to leave this blank it defaults to the to the name of the song but we closed the window and came back and it was there and i forgot to delete it so uh fun fact on a mac i think there's a way to do on the pc but on the mac i can say rename items and i can say find export it's a quick search and replace export stems space hyphen space and replace it with nothing and it will quickly change those back to where it the way i wanted them to begin with now i've got a folder full of stems this is very cool all right next step this one's optional but it's a good habit to get into i'd recommend sending a mix that you've done just a rough mix of the song to include with the files you're sending to the mix engineer if you're sending this to a mix engineer i'm gonna go back to a previous version that i saved remember how i told you to save a version before you start disabling all the plugins i'm gonna open that up and i will actually export a mix down and include that with the files that i'm sending now to be nice i'm gonna export uh everything from bar zero just like i did with my tracks so that if he wants to he or she wants to bring this into the session and have it there lined up with the existing tracks that could be handy so i'm gonna export this between the loop range this time so i come to export mix down just like we're exporting a normal mix we'll call this yeah that's fine we'll make it away file make it 24 bit the same as everything else and we'll go between the loop and we will say yes let's go as a mix engineer i like to get these rough mixes from my clients just so and i don't listen to them at first if at all but it's nice to have them in case there's a particular section where i'm not sure what they wanted if this guitar was supposed to be more prominent or where they like to pan certain tracks that i'm having a problem with i'll listen to their rough mix so it's nice to include it's a nice to have in your mix so the next thing we want to do is put all this together in a file and zip that file because that's gonna be easier for sharing so what i'm gonna do on my desktop i have a folder called exported stems and i'm gonna put everything in there so these stems are located inside the song folder inside the stems folder here so we're going to copy move all of those over next i'll take the mix down which is located inside the mixdown folder inside the same song folder so once you create a mixdown or create stems a folder will appear one's called mixdown one's called stems all your mixdowns will live here all your stems will live here just so you know and we're going to drag that mix down into the same folder no need to really separate them i like to keep it simple like that and then i'll go back and right click on the folder itself and use compress how you zip files inside of a pc i'm not sure but you can google that figure that out this is creating a zip file that i'm going to use i'm going to send this single zip file to the mix engineer and here's the zip file we just created the reason i like to use zip files is it gives me a single file to send versus a folder or a group of files i had someone send me a song to mix once and they shared a dropbox folder with me with the tracks inside turns out i didn't know how many tracks there were there ended up being like 80 tracks so when i opened the folder it showed that there were 30 tracks there i dragged them into studio one started mixing turns out he was still uploading tracks that weren't yet in the folder so as he kept uploading more more tracks were added to the folder that i didn't import into my session it was a big mess uh kind of annoying so it's easier to just have a single file it is a larger file you'll see this is a 721 megabyte file but it's a single file which just in my opinion makes life a lot easier now this is not the kind of file you can email you can't attach this to an email you'll need some sort of file sharing service you can use persona sphere for that you can use dropbox i have a folder inside my dropbox folder so over here this is my desktop this this is my dropbox folder and i've got a clients dropbox here so we'll just call this client a and that'll be a folder i dedicate to a client and i'll just put this stem zip file inside that folder okay so now that's going to be uploading to my dropbox account and once it does i can get a specific download link to share with the mix engineer so right now inside of inside of the the the computer itself without having to go to dropbox.com i just right click on it choose copy dropbox link and now i can go compose an email paste that link there and that person can download that file and there's no need to share folders there's no need to do all of that extra stuff that can sometimes i don't like it when people share folders with me because usually they call the name of the folder joe gilder and so then i have a whole bunch of folders called joe gilder in my system plus if they remove something from the folder or add something to the folder without my knowing it messes up what's on my end so in very rare occasions will i want to use a shared folder typically i like to send a single zip file so that i will send this link to the mix engineer and then when he or her hear her when he or she gets ready to download and mix it they click the link they download it they've got it there they unzip the file they bring them into the session they start mixing some folks might not be okay with using a quote-unquote public link like this you could tell them hey download this tonight and then i'm gonna take it out of dropbox later so other people can't i never care about that kind of stuff nobody's out there trying to steal my dropbox links so i don't worry about it i don't know if you do or not but this is the way that i've chosen to send files back and forth with dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of people over the years and it's worked well so hope this was helpful for you if you have any questions leave a comment below otherwise thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: PreSonus Audio Electronics

Views: 14,465

Keywords: Presonus, Studio One, DAW, recording, mixing, editing, tutorial, tips, Joe Gilder, Home Studio Corner, stems, tracks, export, multitracks

Id: GAvLXM9Dm_I

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021