# Setting up Logic Pro 9 for stems



## Jonik (Aug 9, 2011)

Hi guys,

Brilliant forum you have here - I hope I've got the right board! I did a search and didn't find an answer so I thought I'd ask.

I've done a couple of projects recently where I've wanted to bounce everything out in stems (in Logic Pro 9) (I haven't really done this in the past) and with an aux here, and a reverb bus there... along with having to solo the tracks I want grouped together it got kind of confusing! 

Is there a way of setting up Logic so that it's a lot easier to bounce out stems and any sends I've put in place go with it?

I was wondering whether this would work/be the best way:

Track 1-5 (say, strings) stereo outs become Bus 1
Track 6-8 (say, brass) stereo out becomes Bus 2
Track 9-11 (say WW) stereo out becomes Bus 3.

Any reverbs etc can still be sent out individually via 'sends', or if all the tracks in the group have the same, Bus 1/2 or 3 can have it instead.

Then when I want to bounce out all the strings, say, all I have to do is solo Bus 1? Likewise, if I want to mute the brass all I'd have to do is mute Bus 2?

Does it work like that? Have I got it completely wrong?

Thanks very much

Jonik


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## stonzthro (Aug 9, 2011)

If all your samples have the same room sound that will work, but more often than not you'll use some dry and some wet. So you may need more busses than that.

That approach will work, but do a quick search on reverb and you'll see there are numerous approaches to using convo, but inline seems to be the most common.


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## EastWest Lurker (Aug 9, 2011)

Jonik @ Tue Aug 09 said:


> Hi guys,
> 
> Brilliant forum you have here - I hope I've got the right board! I did a search and didn't find an answer so I thought I'd ask.
> 
> ...



No need to solo. When you want to bounce the stems, simply create audio tracks with those busses as their inputs, arm them, and hit record.


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## dcoscina (Aug 9, 2011)

I must say I love Logic 9's ease of creating busses for multi output AU's like EW PLAY, Halion 4, etc. Kontakt 4 is a little weird for me but Logic is just brilliant at this. 

DP is okay but not as sexy


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## Jonik (Aug 9, 2011)

EastWest Lurker @ Tue Aug 09 said:


> Jonik @ Tue Aug 09 said:
> 
> 
> > Hi guys,
> ...



That's brilliant, cheers!

Having just done a test I take it that any 'sends' that each track has also has to be sent to the correct audio track bus? So it's best not to use the same reverb bus for different stems as they can't have more than one send?


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## charlieclouser (Aug 9, 2011)

My Logic template has Aux objects as stem submasters - these have busses as their source and feed hardware outputs. To mix the stems down into a final mix, the stem master Aux objects have sends that go to a set of final Mix busses, which also feed hardware outputs (the main ones that go to my speakers). All instruments and audio tracks are directed to one of the busses that feed the stem submasters, NEVER to the Mix bus (which is ONLY fed by the unity-gain sends from the stem submasters).

Note that all of the Stem Masters should be AUX objects, not BUS objects, as the BUS objects do NOT have sends, whereas the AUX ones DO, so I can use the sends to combine the Stem Submasters into a final mix while still sending the stems to separate outputs for recording in ProTools on a second machine.

In addition, I have created separate sets of reverb and delay Auxes for each stem - a front reverb, rear reverb, front delay, and rear delay for each stem.

I need to use multiple Mix busses because I am printing each stem in surround, and since Logic's surround capabilities only support a single surround mix, they are insufficient for printing surround stems - meaning I need to fake surround by creating a stereo pair for front L+R, another stereo pair for rear L+R, a mono LFE and a mono Center channel for each stem.

In the picture below you can see my output matrix for a 3x surround stem setup:

Top row, L>R:

1 - stereo output object for outs 1+2 (this is so I can make quick stereo bounces).

2 - Master fader (this allows me to trim ALL outputs at the same time with one fader).

3-6 - These are the Mix Bus Auxes - fed from busses which are in turn fed from sends on the stem masters. Destination is hardware outputs 1-6 which feed my ProTools layback recorder and my surround speakers.

7-10 - These are the Drum Stem submasters. Their sources are busses, and Instruments and drum fx feed these busses. The sends at the top feed these into the Mix bus (objects 3-6 above), and the jiggly red lines indicate where they're going. The destinations for these Auxes are hardware outputs 7-12, so these feed the second set of six audio outputs and are recorded on the corresponding tracks on the PT machine.

11-14 - These are the Keys Stem submasters. Same as 7-10 above, but fed from another set of busses. These also have sends feeding them into the Mix bus at unity gain. I didn't draw more jiggly red lines as it would have gotten cluttered, but those sends go to the same destinations that the ones on the Drum Stem do.

15-18 - These are the Orch Stem submasters. Same as above, fed from yet another set of busses. Same jiggly red lines not drawn, but implied.

Bottom Row, L>R:

1-3 - Ableton, Reason, and Click inputs. These are just feeds from ReWire devices and Click, so they are just for monitoring, as I always bounce ReWire devices as audio and include them directly in the Logic session for mixdown, never playing them in the background while mixing - that's why they are routed to "Stereo Output 1+2".

4-7 - These are the FX Auxes for the Drum Stem. Their sources are the busses that individual tracks and instruments send to for FX, and their destinations are the Drum Stem submaster busses directly above them. The jiggly red lines indicate how the FX Auxes are routed to the Stem Submasters.

8-11 - Same as 4-7 above, but these are the Keys Stem FX Auxes.

12-15 - Same as above, but these are for the Orch Stem FX.

In the top row all the way to the right you can see the first three VI tracks, which I've set up to demonstrate how tracks are routed to each of the three stems - DRUM-01 is being routed to the Drum Stem submaster, with four sends to give me reverb+delay in the front and the back - four sends total. DRUM-2 is being routed to the Keys Stem submaster, and note that it's sends are going to different busses that feed the FX corresponding to the Keys Stem - THIS is how I can have separate effects for each stem, and can print all stems at once without solo-ing anything. DRUM-3 is being sent to the Orch Stem, with corresponding FX routing.

With this setup, I can print 24 tracks at once over to protools on another machine, with tracks 1-6 being a straight-fader sum of all three stems (each of which contains its own fx), tracks 7-12 being Drum Stem, 13-18 being Keys Stem, and 19-24 being Orch Stem - for a grand total of 24 tracks per cue. These come out of the first 24 hardware outputs of my MOTU 2408mk3 system on ADAT, and since the ADAT and TDIF and analog outputs all mirror each other, I can route the ADAT over to ProTools while the TDIF is feeding my digital surround monitors at the same time, and also the analog outs are feeding my DVD recorder for making previews DVDs. So complex it's simple!

If I'm not using ProTools on a second machine as a layback recorder, I could just create a set of empty audio tracks in Logic and route the Stem Masters and Mix Masters to those tracks and record in realtime - but it's much easier to use PT as a layback recorder that collects all the mixes for an entire project. 

Obviously, a non-surround setup would be much simpler, requiring only a single stereo Aux for the Mix and one for each Stem, and half as many FX Auxes. Somewhere I have a template that's set up this way, with 8x stereo stem masters feeding a single Mix master, and 16x FX Auxes - one reverb and one delay per Stem. It's these separate FX Auxes for each stem that is crucial if you don't want to have to solo things while bouncing or printing stems.

You'll notice that all of the Stem submasters and the corresponding FX Aux objects are members of groups (the yellow text above the faders) - this is so that if I mute any one of the objects corresponding to the Drum Stem, for instance, they will ALL mute. This is how I can quickly kill a stem and all of its FX, and insures that if I trim or automate one member of a group, they will all trim.

You can see that I've gone to the trouble of naming all of my busses in Logic's "I/O Labels" window - makes things much easier to figure out.

Another trick I've employed is to keep a 1-to-1 relationship between Logic's busses and the inputs and busses in ProTools - remember that a stereo bus in Logic is a single bus, whereas in ProTools a stereo pair takes TWO busses, so what I've done is to skip over the right channel of any of Logic's stereo busses, so that, for instance, in the Drum Stem, the front stereo pair is Bus 7, the rear pair is Bus 9, and the Center is Bus 10, and the LFE is Bus 11. This keeps things straight when I'm lining up Logic's busses with PT's inputs, etc. - as PT would need six mono busses to do what Logic can do with two stereo busses and two mono ones. Confusing until you're looking at both programs side-by-side....

And remember, no signal is EVER routed directly to the Mix busses (except for click and monitor-only things like ReWire in my case), otherwise it won't be present in the Stems when you print.

Does that make sense? I set this up eight years ago and have been using it for every project since then...


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## dinerdog (Aug 9, 2011)

Nice! You have just made my life a whole lot easier. Thanks bro. =o


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## Jonik (Aug 10, 2011)

Wow that's really helpful, thank you. I think I'm going to need a chunk of time to take that all in though!!

Thanks for the screenshot - it definitely helped my understanding!


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## charlieclouser (Aug 10, 2011)

This setup is quite old and a little large - and to be honest, the surround capabilities are kind of overkill. Everyone else's setup I've seen is stereo-only.

In my stereo-only setup it's a LOT simpler, but operates on the same principles - individual reverb and delay for each stem, and the stem submasters feeding the final mix bus via sends. With a 24-channel layback recorder I can get a lot more stems going, like 1-drums, 2-perc, 3-guitars, 4-keys, 5-strings low, 6-strings hi, 7-brass lo, 8-brass+winds hi, 9-pianos etc, 10-fx shots, etc etc etc. - but this just seems to unwind my mix too much and give the dubbing mixers the ability to just wreck everything. When I just give them three stems I can still apply massive program compression on each stem to keep everything nice and glued-together.

Another note is that I've never routed anything to the Center channels (they are just there out of a bloated sense of thoroughness), and the guys on the dub stage like that just fine as they use these channels for dlg + fx. 

I have hit the LFE channels with sub booms and kick drums from time to time, and I do this by using a fifth send from the individual instrument or audio track.

When I'm actually sending to the LFE I usually put a lowpass eq on the LFE stem submasters, but these are missing on the screenshot.

You can see I've inserted my beloved TC MasterX5 on the front pair of each stem submaster, but what's missing in the screenshot is matching MX5's on the back pair - sometimes I run out of PowerCore juice and so I leave those for instances where I'm actually sending something to the back channels. Often I will just use a plain old Logic compressor on the back pair instead of fancy MasterX5.

This setup is more complex than it would be if Logic supported surround in the same manner that ProTools does - where busses and sends could be in surround. But Logic only has ONE set of surround outputs, and anything that uses the surround panner gets routed to these outputs. This is fine if you are actually doing a final surround mix in Logic, but if you need to output surround stems you've got to fake it as I have done in the screenshot - just as you would when doing surround on a stereo-only SSL console, which I've done in the past in exactly the manner described above - through tricky use of mono and stereo busses. What you don't get when doing this is fancy joystick-like surround panners, but that's okay as I'm not automating things rotating around the room, as you might when doing fx mixing on the dub stage. 

What I'm really doing is mixing in quad, with a front pair and a back pair, and using two stereo reverbs with different settings in the front and back will give you a big quad sound even when the verbs are all being fed the same mono source instrument. I also set up the delays to be a "quad-ping-pong", with different settings in the front and back, so if something hits both delays it bounces around front-to-back as well as L-to-R.

In rare cases where the music wants to be an all-surrounding sound-designy mess, I have done "quad-tracking", which is similar to double-tracking two guitars and hard-panning them L and R, but using four discrete performances of an instrument instead of two. This sounds ridiculously great in my room but by the time the mix guys on the dub stage have messed with it the effect is lessened or eliminated - so, oh well. I still do it on the main titles to horror movies just because it's fun. I still think the music should be massive in the surrounds and just blanket the listener in claustrophobic mess, giving no escape from the quad-tracked chugs, but few others share my vision!


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## stevenson-again (Aug 12, 2011)

charlie i am curious as to why you do it this way. the surround file that logic creates is automatically split by PT when imported. or is it that you prefer to layback directly to PT or that is how things started out for you and you stuck to it. it's still an impressive setup though, because recording stems always comes up as an issue. i am a bit resistant to breaking the mix up altogether because since the music mix has an 'overall' reverb, generally a nice lexicon or TC hardware reverb, and fooling about with it in the dub too much might affect the sound image. you seem to get around that by having individual reverb for each stereo stem. still not sure i am hugely comfortable with that but if it works for you then maybe i should reconsider it.

interesting that you leave out the centre channel too - makes sense. i have simply been pulling it right back but i might look at removing it altogether. thanks for posting this - very interesting.


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## EastWest Lurker (Aug 12, 2011)

Charlie, maybe I am being dense here (again) but if you are sending the stems to an engineer who will mix it on the dub stage, does he/she not decide where each goes in the surround field? If so, then even for a surround mix wouldn't you just give them stereo and mono stems with maybe a reference mix for your idea of surround placement?

Or is this mostly to go into PT when you are your own mix engineer?


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## stevenson-again (Aug 12, 2011)

> Charlie, maybe I am being dense here (again) but if you are sending the stems to an engineer who will mix it on the dub stage, does he/she not decide where each goes in the surround field?




well no!

the dubbing engineer is absolutely not going to do that kind of mixing...or did you mean a dedicated music mixing engineer alla shawn murphy? if so maybe, but it depends.

the stems, if played at unity, should give you your mix, but also the option for the engineer for getting in there and tweak stuff if it clashes with things they are doing or has arrived from SFX. but they should be all properly mixed at that stage.


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## EastWest Lurker (Aug 12, 2011)

stevenson-again @ Fri Aug 12 said:


> > Charlie, maybe I am being dense here (again) but if you are sending the stems to an engineer who will mix it on the dub stage, does he/she not decide where each goes in the surround field?
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Thanks , Rohan. Yes my stereo stems are always delivered that way but i did not know what is expected as far as surround field placement Good to know if someone actually ever asks me to deliver surround and is willing to pay for it.


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## charlieclouser (Aug 12, 2011)

stevenson - I use PT on a second machine as a layback recorder for a few reasons: 

I can create a single PT session for each reel of a film, and mixes are laid into it with PT as MTC master and Logic as slave, into a timeline that has no inherent tempo map. This way I can capture multiple passes (versions) if I want to, separate some items as "overlays" by muting them during the first pass of three stems, and stuff like that. On PTHD3 I can have four sets of 24 tracks playing, so when cues overlap (they always do) I can have a main pass and an overlay pass of each cue ringing out over incoming cues without running out of voices or anything. Also, this way I have a set of timestamped files that I can just give to the dub stage and they can drop them into THEIR master music PT session and do what they want with them. I don't actually give the dub stage a PT session, I only give them the raw audio files - this way there's no funny business with session i/o setup conflicts, channel/track layouts, etc. One nifty thing I do is to make a sync test track for each reel in PT - this is a mono audio file with a 2pop at the top and an end-pop at the back, and I glue this into a single contiguous audio file, verify that it locks to my picture, and give this to the music editor on the stage so they can verify that all my frame rates and pull-down and all that junk is correct. If that single, contiguous audio file has the pops in the right place on the stage, then I know that my individual cues will be at the correct timings.

Also, if I ever need to preview cues for a director, I can just print rough mixes over to PT and then preview from there without loading up individual cues in Logic - we can just breeze through a reel and I only have to hit "open" when we change reels. Also, if I have to make a preview DVD or QT movie, then I can do each reel in one pass. On my TV series I would print the mixes for the whole episode into one long session in PT, so I could make a preview DVD that ran top-to-bottom for 42 minutes without stopping - I would mix the dialog+sfx in front of the music in realtime with hands on faders. All the stoppy-starty stuff would break the flow, but when the showrunner could just watch the whole thing at once it just breezes on by...

I don't use "overall" reverb, ever. I DO use identical settings on each stem, but they are separate verbs - I don't really care if there's a difference in sound between using separate or overall reverb, nobody's going to notice or care with the muck I'm producing. Anyway, all 6 of my Space Designers are just set to "Piano Hall 3 sec" or something - I spent about five minutes eight years ago picking a preset from the factory library and just copy/pasted that setting to all of the verbs, and I've never even bothered to edit or change the settings for any project since then. Sounds fine, whatever... next problem. I'm not trying to get a realistic soundstage or duplicate the sound of an orch in the room or anything like that, I just like things DARK and WET. For eight years I've been meaning to listen to other reverb plugs or make it past preset four in the factory Space Designer library but never got around to it. I don't care too much about fancy reverb - I'm more concerned about the sound coming out of the samplers, so I don't mess with hardware verbs or Altiverb or IR libraries or anything - factory preset four is fine by me. Besides, if I used an overall reverb then I'd have to print each stem as a separate pass, and I'm far too impatient for that! Anyway, by using a separate verb on each stem then if the dub mixers change the balance between the stems, or even mute a stem entirely, the reverbs stay the way I wanted them. 

Using Logic's surround mixing features means that you are doing a single, final, surround mix - there is no possibility of outputting multiple surround stems simultaneously from Logic if you want to use their surround panners - try it, you'll see that Logic's surround panners cannot feed BUSSES; there is only one set of surround destinations, and these destinations are a single set of 6 outputs. Besides, the surround panners are overkill if you're not automating things flying around the room, even if they could feed busses I would still probably do it my way to make sure I didn't have leakage between channels due to one of the little "balls" in the surround panner display being moved a tiny bit from where it should be. When do I need to use a joystick to move something? Never. Also, if I used Logic's surround panners I'd have to print each stem as a separate pass, and again, impatience wins.

The main reason I leave out the center channel is because it would be inconvenient to send anything there due to my weird output matrix - I'd have to use a send from the individual track and try to balance that against the L+R main channels, so it's too much hassle. On my first movie I asked if the dub mixers cared that my center was empty, and they said, "that's fine" and so I haven't messed with it since. Also, in my rig I have the temp score and dialog routed to my center speaker via MOTU CueMix (so it is always audible but never "enters" Logic), and on my Dynaudio AIR speaker remote I can just hit a button to mute the center channel, so that's how I can quickly mute and unmute the temp+dialog while I'm working - no mouse or fader needed. If I changed this setup I'd probably get a separate speaker system for dialog+temp, but the way I've got it set up takes zero additional gear and is quick.

Lurker - On the dub stage all they can really do is allow or deny my surround feeds (they probably just kill them, I've never really heard much music in the back on my projects in the theater). I make the decision as to what will go back there, usually it will be things like sul pont trems, fingers scraping piano strings wiggly-like, or mega-drones that get sent to the backs, to make it sound like the audience is surrounded by terrifying sounds - it's never an attempt to make a "surround picture of the orchestral stage". On main titles I often quad-track the sound-designy bits and do things like have big reverse sounds start first in the back and then swoosh toward the front - I do this by having four separate takes of that sound with the rears starting a little earlier than the fronts. Sounds 2 wykkid dude! But for me it's more of a sound-design thing than an attempt to make a realistic anything.

I don't have a Shawn Murphy or an Alan Meyerson or anyone to mix my scores, I just mix in Logic with the standard eq and compressor on every track, my front+rear Space Designer and ping-pong echo, and a MasterX5 on each stem to crush the living shit out of everything in the front. I don't use CC11, CC7, or track automation or mess with it after it's printed - I just mix while composing, using MIDI note velocity to make some notes louder than others - to me, outputting each track and letting someone else eq, effect, and mix the thing would defeat the purpose of my programming. I've adjusted the output level of each EXS instrument so that all my channel faders can stay at zero most of the time. Bring up a saved channel-strip setting, which recalls the EXS instrument with it's saved eq and comp, and go - it's already mixed. I'm placing elements on top of each other in my own relationship to one another and I don't want to have to explain what I meant or wonder why some weedy little sound is now way out in front. With my complete lack of actual musical knowledge or ability to simulate what a real orchestra would do, all of these fancy libraries sound fake as hell anyway, so it's very much a case of everything hiding behind everything else, and if I let someone else mix it then all of a sudden I'd be hearing all the velocity splits and the lameness of my playing. I DO make sure that each stem could play on it's own and still sound like "music" in case that's what happens on the dub stage - that's why I only use three stems instead of splitting it up into strings low/strings hi/brass low/etc. I'm totally stone-age, simple, and fast... just like you'd mix if it were 1992 and you were triggering samples in an S900 from StudioVision.

If I ever get on bigger projects I may have to eventually let someone else ruin my mix, but I like ruining it myself - it's fun! To me it just seems like it's too much effort to explain what I meant and have a committee of people all trying to repair my crap... no need to bother a serious professional with it - plus I've never been on a film that wasn't wall-to-wall score and had more than five weeks from spot to dub, so there just isn't time to have a "mix" phase in the production - and I'm antisocial as heck, I hate being in recording studios, driving in traffic, or leaving my comfy room for any reason at all - so I like just doing these all-in, all-silicon scores where they hand me a copy of the movie and five weeks later I hand them a finished score. I don't even go to the dub stage for the mix - too boring; by lunchtime on day one I'd have drunk fifteen cups of coffee and eaten all of the bagels and would be tearing my hair out! I went to one dub and all I did was sit there; it's not like the dubbing mixers are going to ask what I think of the mix. They're going to do what they do and the composer can get stuffed! Anyway, I'd be too embarrassed to give my individual tracks to a real scoring mixer for fear they'd be able to hear how janky it all is!


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## Marius Masalar (Aug 12, 2011)

I don't think I've ever learned more from a single post.


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## EastWest Lurker (Aug 12, 2011)

All I can say, is Charlie, whatever you're doing is working, because I love your stuff, as you know.


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## charlieclouser (Aug 12, 2011)

Thank you for the kind compliments, gentlemen....


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## EastWest Lurker (Aug 12, 2011)

charlieclouser @ Fri Aug 12 said:


> Thank you for the kind compliments, gentlemen....



Gentlemen? Hey, no need to insult me! :twisted:


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## NYC Composer (Aug 13, 2011)

Great friggin' post, Charlie. I L'dMAO. Really!


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## JohnG (Dec 11, 2018)

charlieclouser said:


> I don't even go to the dub stage for the mix - too boring; by lunchtime on day one I'd have drunk fifteen cups of coffee and eaten all of the bagels and would be tearing my hair out!



Me too -- especially the coffee. And the hair. And the bagels.


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