Chicago Recording Studio

Congratulations to AVM for making the Northwest Indiana Top Ten album list!!

One of the “latest techniques” used in mastering today is the use of “stems” during mastering. Stems are really sub-mixes of instruments used in a mixdown. To make stems the mixing engineer will first mix the tune. The mixing engineer will then turn off all channels except for the one’s that would be used for the stem that was being created. For instance, to record a “Drums” stem, the mixing engineer would mute any channel that didn’t have drums and record the stem.

The engineer then may turn off all channels that don’t have lead or background vocal parts to make a “Vocals” stem. The engineer would repeat this technique until there were four to six stereo stem tracks that, when combined at the same level, would make the mix that the mixing engineer wanted.

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