How to Prepare Stems for Mixing - The Right Way! (Logic Pro X Tutorial)

what's up y'all this is jake and today i want to share some important tips on how to clean up your raw audio files in logic pro export your stems the right way and make sure they're 100 ready for the mixing process [Music] so you've come to the point in your music making process where everything is completely tracked in your project and now it's time to mix so whether you are going to be doing the mixing yourself or if you're sending it off to someone else to mix there are certain things you need to do in order to properly prepare your individual audio files or stems for the mix down process now some things i've noticed over the years when artists send me their stems for me to mix are things like mislabeled or confusing track names audio files that don't line up properly because they don't have the same start point tracks that are either way too loud or way too quiet tracks that have excessive amounts of clicks pops or noise tracks that aren't phase corrected things like that now if your stems do have any of these issues it's not the end of the world a lot of these problems can be fixed before the mix down process but you really do want to avoid as many issues as possible before you send them off so that more time can be spent actually mixing the song instead of fixing all the technical problems and it's especially important if you're paying a whole lot of money to get your songs mixed because if you're creating a whole lot of extra work for the engineer to fix certain problems it's really just going to cost you more in the end so basically the point is to get your tracks as clean and organized as humanly possible so that all it takes to start mixing is to drag your stems over to an empty project file and boom everything is labeled lined up and ready to go so let's go ahead and jump over to logic pro where i can show you how to get your stems completely organized and ready for mixing all right so we have logic open here this is a project i'll be using just to show you what i mean so first things first we're going to create a new version of the project by going to file project alternatives choose a new alternative because we're going to be doing a lot of changes that you don't want to necessarily affect your original project so let's call this whatever your title of your project is we'll just go ahead and call it uh premix stem prep something like that click ok all right so what we're going to do first is actually go to the mixer window and look at everything we have all the plugins looks okay so however your mix is right now before you start prepping all the stems will be your reference mix and we'll go ahead and balance that right now so first things first set the cycle range right here or you can toggle it using c to be however long your song is so the start point will obviously be where the song starts which is right here and where the song ends we'll kind of have it right here because the song fades out give it just a little bit more time to hang on all right so we're gonna set it there and you can either click command b for bounce or go to the mixer window go over to the far right and where it says stereo out this is your stereo out mix so you'll click the bounce button and takes you to this window and as you can see the cycle we set up actually is reflected right here so the logic already knows where to export the start and end so it knows how long your mix is going to be and what we're going to do is go ahead and bounce a wave file which is an uncompressed version of the song as well as an mp3 just in case we need it uh for this one for the wave we can do wave 24 bit sample rate is fine as long as it matches your project and we'll want to do offline so that you don't have to listen to the whole song while it's bouncing and make sure you click normalize off same thing for mp3 it copies the settings over 320 looks good and we'll go ahead and call this whatever your song name is reference mix it's probably a better way to kind of condense that we'll call it ref mix and what i like to do is put the bpm in the title which kind of helps sometimes we'll do 120 because it's 120 bpm and we'll go ahead and click ok okay save it let's see you might have to click the name again ref mix 120. go ahead and balance that all right so now that we have a reference mix balance before we start changing things uh now we can actually start to prepare all your stems so what i like to do is go ahead and hold down the option key and click every fader what that's going to do is bring it to zero for every fader so we can sort of reset the mixing console so that everything is at zero next we'll want to make sure all the panning is set at zero looks like everything already is um and then we're gonna we're going to want to turn off the sins right now these are sending to buses that have uh like a room room reverb delay so we're just gonna turn those off and next we're gonna want to turn off all the plug-ins on every track uh some people might decide they have a plug-in on a specific track that is super crucial to their sound if you have like for instance uh saturation on a track on this bass track i have a bunch of things going on i've got like a chorus effect slight eq got a decapitator by sound toys to give it some more saturation so if you take it off you kind of notice that things are missing so for this track i might just want to take off the eqs [Music] and leave the processing i have because the course is really important for the sound so if you have any if you run into any uh questions of like well should i keep this plug-in should i turn it off uh just go with your instinct if you like the sound you like the sound you don't trust somebody to be messing it up or changing it later just go with what feels right all right so once you've kind of made the decisions on which plugins to turn off and which ones to keep you see i've turned off most of mine turn off all the sends to effects so now we're going to look at the individual files themselves and see how loud they are hitting right now so obviously when i play it everything is super loud because some of them are hitting a little too loud some of them are getting a little too soft so what we're going to do is go track by track and look at where we're peaking in terms of decibels and next what we're going to do is go up to the top the toolbar uh click this to look at more options if your screen is a little small like mine is and click pre-fader metering so what this is going to tell us and you notice it kind of switches over here flips from side to side and what this is going to tell us is how loud the audio files are before any fader adjustments so if we go ahead and play this we have the vocal solo [Music] by the way these are just uh test vocals they don't have any lyrics in them only i can make fun of my singing so right now it's hitting at about if we go to the what looks like the loudest point in the song [Music] telling about negative 14.9 so that's okay um usually i want just to be consistent i like everything hitting peaking at negative 12 db um the reason for that is when you send it over it's not too loud it's not too soft usually negative 12 is a good place for the audio file to hit any sort of plug-in like a compressor where it's not overloading it but it's not too low that it's not making any changes right away either so if we go up here click this little option and select whatever audio files we have we're going to select both audio files for these this vocal channel go over to gain and since it's negative 14.9 we're going to do a little math in our heads raise that up by 2.9 db so that we're hitting more towards negative 12 db [Music] so now it's hitting negative 12.1 that's good enough for us uh next we're going to go to the second one do the same thing [Music] man these vocals sound great i i hope you're enjoying them as much as i am and we're going to want to do the same thing bring that up to negative or sorry plus 0.5 [Music] is great isn't it so negative 12 that's fine we'll raise it up 0.3 look at the window okay next we're going to look at a software instrument [Music] and as you can see this one is right out the gate with any fake without any fader adjustments super loud so we're actually going to be looking inside the virtual instrument which in this case is the logic sampler and let's see the volume we're kind of hitting is around see if we can see louder negative negative 4.2 so that's that's kind of loud um so if we look at the output volume in the software instrument or whatever uh virtual instrument you might be using you see it's at negative four so if we add negative four on here we will need to reduce it by eight decibels so that it hits negative 12 pre-phatering so let's go ahead and bring it down to negative twelve there we go it's hitting at negative 12. [Music] oh that one is kind of loud hitting a negative 10. let's go ahead and drop that by two dbs all right sort of hitting negative 12 as well and basically you want to continue doing this for every track you have so that negative 12 right across the board is super consistent all right so now that we have all our gains adjusted for all the audio files um let's see we looked at the software instrument output volume everything looks good if we get that little test so i made some adjustments for every uh [Music] for every uh percussion element with my sampler so you make little volume adjustments here and there you'll make sure that every drum hit is sitting at negative 12 and doesn't always have to be exactly negative 12. it's uh you can do negative 15. uh whatever is a consistent uh place to look at in terms of decibels that will not uh peak too loud or too quietly whatever works for you negative 12 works for me all right so now that we have all our volumes figured out we'll do a last minute look at some of the audio files themselves usually to avoid any clicks or pops whenever audio files come in i like to add fades at the beginning and end of every audio file so what we're going to look at is the secondary tool you have the first tool that's your regular one your pointer tool for our secondary tool we're going to go down to fade tool in this little window right here now when we hover over the start of any audio file as a matter of fact let's go ahead and chop any thing we don't need you can also do the function strip silence which will automatically get rid of any silence you have in your audio files which will also prevent any noise that might happen in between takes so for example this is a vocal take so i'm just kind of removing the stuff that we don't really need and i have a hot key that i made just for chopping things up right now i have apple tea which is a split function you can also find it up here split by playhead which does the same thing so if you find a hotkey that works for you just go for it alright next to apply the fade tool to our audio files we already selected the fade tool so now we'll hover around the start of the the audio files you want to select hold down the command key click and drag to create a nice little fade and you can adjust this as you need to make sure we're selecting everything this way when the audio file comes in there's no abrupt uh clicking noises or popping so it's nice and clean when it comes in we'll do the same for the ends and you want to go ahead and make sure you're not affecting things you don't want to effect on the other audio files all right and you'll basically do the same to all of your audio files in the track uh software instruments obviously you don't have to worry about this because it's all midi alright so all your audio files and tracks are all cleaned up here they're all labeled properly so next we're going to look at bouncing the stems and what you'll want to do we'll set up that cycle again because we took it out last time that looks about right for the end point start point looks okay and a nice trick instead of soloing every track clicking bounce which you can do if you're a perfectionist and you want to have quality control over every track when you're bouncing them uh a nice thing that logic has is the if you go to file export and all tracks as audio files you'll actually bounce all the stems at once so if we make a new folder in the bounces we'll call it russian ocean stems create and now you'll choose how you want to bounce it uh as before we'll do the wav files export cycle range only because we're doing this cycle range as we selected bit depth we'll go ahead and do 24 bits kind of the standard for audio files uh and this this one is important because i actually do have a multi-output software instrument which is doing the drums in this track so we're going to select one file per channel strip and what that means is i have these channel strips so it's going to do a single file for every drum sound i'll have a file for the kick audio file for snare clap hi-hat this is very important to turn normalize off if you do any of these other ones it will bring up the volume automatically in every uh track so that it hits zero we're not talking about unity we're talking about just under clipping and we don't want that because we want to keep our negative 12 what we work so hard to adjust for every track um so normalize us do off so it won't automatically uh add gain to every track we have next for a pattern this will be how you name your tracks and it shows you an example so if we i usually like to do the project name track name and i'll do one of these one of these guys boop looks nice doesn't it all right so we're ready to bounce so let's click export [Music] all right so once your files are done exporting going to want to go up here right click on the title of your project this little drop down menu will bring you to your project folder that pops up go to bounces stems this is the folder we made earlier and there you go all your stems are printed and ready to be mixed all right so next time you're getting a track ready for mixing and your files are unorganized and all over the place in your project if you follow these steps i promise you whoever is mixing your project whether it's you or someone else will be very happy and it doesn't really matter what program you use just because i use logic pro doesn't mean these steps won't work the same way for things like ableton pro tools cubase reason it's it's all pretty much the same fundamentals so if you like what you just saw please click like subscribe to my channel and stay tuned for more production tips on jake thompson audio [Music] you

Channel: JakeThomsonAudio

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Keywords: logic pro x, exporting stems in logic x, logic pro, prepare stems, how to prepare stems for mixing, mixing, export stems, export stems logic pro x, clean up audio files, logic pro clean up project, logic pro x clean up project, how to bounce stems, how to bounce stems logic pro, logic pro tutorial, logic pro x tutorial, mixing tutorial, logic pro x for beginners, logic pro x mixing and mastering, mixing in logic pro x, stem mixing and mastering, music production tutorials

Id: LiRoHvMFS5U

Length: 21min 23sec (1283 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020