Stems

[AngHellic]

Hello,

My Name is Jared. I have been "out of the loop" (so to speak) for a while. I have been volunteering In Iraq... Now that I am back home with post tramatic stress disorder, I found it easier for me to relax when I am creating an original track or more often remixing another (which is my favorite thing to do) I am having a serious problem. When I went to Iraq in 2003, Acid planet & other places were still strictly loop based production downloads. I went to download a remix & seen these Stems. Which for the life of me I can not understand at all.

I know when you lay them (stems) out it creates the actual full original track. What I dont understand is how are we to remix the song being in stem form. . Also what I am not understanding is why does every remix seem to be out of sync now? It seems like as if 90% of the time the acapellas are way out of sync compared to the rest of the track. I noticed this when I tried to lay my own loops to acapellas & was only to get one to work... Possibly by accident? Granted I am not a newbie, just a newbie to this whole stem idea. Can someone please give me a hand, bring me back up to speed....?? so I can do what makes me relax.

[Oscar TG]

Hi Jared,

I too started out entering contests on Acid Planet, I even won one way back in 2003!

Creating loops, especially Acidized loops, is quite time consuming, it's far easier for the artist / producer to just export each channel of their mix to a separate stem and leave it to the remixer to do the leg-work.

Why are vocals sometimes out of sync? Because they're usually recorded separately - the recording is started before the music is played through the headphones for the singer. Often, the singer will be listening to a not-quite-final version of the track, so there will be differences. Also, they may have sung "pick-ups" - re-sung lines that weren't quite right in the first place, which have then been slotted in to approximately the right place in the track.

This is how I use stems:
Import each stem into your DAW of choice (I use Acid 7)
Use some form of beat matching to detect tempo, unless you already know the tempo
Set the master tempo of the entire piece to the correct tempo based on the imported stems
Change each stem from one-shot to beatmapped, if they're already beatmapped, manually adjust the tempo for each to match the master tempo
Manually adjust the start point of each stem so they line up (not usually a problem for electronic based music as it will normally be completely synced, apart from vocals)
Go through each stem in turn, chopping out the loops you want to use. You can either export them to create your own loops, or just copy and paste them around

Hope this helps, and good luck!

[AngHellic]

Thank you so much man, Yes that helps me out a lot bro...I too am using acid 7 series. I was not understanding the concept behind how we were to make something out of the stems. I was getting quite upset lol, I was trying to figure it out for so long I was getting stress headaches & Tooth aches from clinching & grinding my teeth lol. this will help me out a whole hell of a lot. I dont think I can thank you enough.. I was afraid no one would answer.


Jared Wingate.