Question

I thought I asked this before, but it was either not accepted or I forgot to hit send (likely)

In the real world, especially sync, stems aren't tracks (and yes, I grew up recording when there were no stems, so I get it).

It appears Studio One doesn't export "true" stems. In practice I give a music supervisor the mixdown and the sound guys will want stems so they can remix etc. No, they don't want the tracks, either processed or not. They want for instance, guitars as a stem, drums as a stem, keys as a stem, percussion as a stem, vox as a stem, the only "track" I generally give is lead vocal.

These would be stereo of course, and the whole point of stems is fx should be rendered and just putting the stems in an empty project will give the exact same mix as the stereo master. Maybe I'm missing something, but S1 can't do that. If it can, I'll be happy.

Here is more on stems for those confused (like I was at first), and I realize many of you already know this, but many probably don't.

https://blog.discmakers.com/2021/07/recording-studio-income-make-money-from-daw-and-stems/

Answer 1

Studio One already does this.  There are at least two ways to do this.  One of the easiest is by bussing your instrument groups.  If you bus your instrument groups i.e. drums, guitars, keys, percussion, etc. by selecting all of the relevant channels and then choosing "add bus for selected channels."  You should end up with a drums bus, guitars bus, keys bus, percussion bus, etc.  When you then go to  "Song->Export Stems", under "Sources" you can choose "Channels" and then only select the busses that you want from the list of available channels.  This will export the exact stems that you want.

You can also do this without creating the busses, but then it requires multiple trips to the "Song-Export Stems" menu to export groups of channels per instrument group.

Answer 2

Are you sure S1 can't do the things you want? It's a very powerful DAW with a comprehensive set of features and I would be very surprised if you couldn't get the results you want.

Answer 3

This doesn't seem to take fx/master bus into account. The whole point of stems is to be able to recreate the mix. I guess I'm missing something.

Answer 4

I'm also after this feature. Exporting stems in Channels mode doesn't include sends and master processing on the exports of busses. It would be good if Busses can be included in the Tracks mode, i.e. would be possible to select busses to run though the entire signal path as if it's was solo'ed and exported manually.