Hi,
I wish to Master my own stem mixes but there are there no obvious tutorials to do this correctly (after scouring the net for almost a year).
I have come across this great video: from Mihkel, but it only helps me prepare my mixed stems 'pre-master'.
To elaborate, I am placing all my 'stem mixes' into a new project (in Cubase 9) and I then master my overall mix by using the plugin 'Ozone 9' which is placed in my Stereo Out channel (I am unaware of any other way to do this in order for Ozone to master my mix).
Now, when I want to batch export each individual stem master in order to send them to a library client I am faced with the problem of trying to have Ozone 9 act upon all of the stems whilst having Cubase independently 'listen' to all my stems as I export them out as separate stem Masters (I know a lot of libraries have 'in-house' mastering engineers but some of the libraries out there do not hence my need to master my own stems).
Ozone 9 does not have a sidechain functionality to connect all the stems whilst being exported (so the stems cannot listen to one another whilst simultaneously being affected by Ozone's processing) and nor can Cubase look ahead at my Stereo Output in order to allow Ozone 9's processing to affect the stems as they are being batch exported. So I am left with the option of mastering each stem individually which of course means that Ozone 9's processing acts differently upon each separate stem track than it does when all the tracks are playing together - this in turn causing each mastered stem to be printed off completely off the mark and when summed together they are, sonically, radically altered.
Placing an instance of Ozone 9 on every stem would be utterly counter intuitive as it would use an insane amount of CPU which would in effect freeze my DAW, (Ozone 9 seems to be devised as a processing suite which needs only one instance loaded into a DAW in order to master the mix).
Mihkel's insightful video highlights the problem within Cubase which is, any tracks in the chain placed after the group channels that you are batch exporting (stems in this case) are ignored in the export process and I can find no solution to working around this problem.
Every tutorial I have seen on the internet seems to point towards preparing your stems for a Mastering engineer to do this job for you but I need to 'be the mastering engineer' due to a lack of financial capacity to pay anyone else.
If anyone has any idea what I may do to rectify this problem then I would be eternally grateful.
As a caveat I am aware that the mastered stems will ultimately be a little bit different to the overall Stereo master but in my case, the stems are so far off that it makes them useless as product. I am also aware that there is a great deal of information regarding this topic but non of it clearly identifies and answers this specific problem and so hopefully my question will not seem repetitively tiresome
I have attached a couple of screenshots in case that helps clarify my workflow.
Many thanks,
Anthony
I wish to Master my own stem mixes but there are there no obvious tutorials to do this correctly (after scouring the net for almost a year).
I have come across this great video: from Mihkel, but it only helps me prepare my mixed stems 'pre-master'.
To elaborate, I am placing all my 'stem mixes' into a new project (in Cubase 9) and I then master my overall mix by using the plugin 'Ozone 9' which is placed in my Stereo Out channel (I am unaware of any other way to do this in order for Ozone to master my mix).
Now, when I want to batch export each individual stem master in order to send them to a library client I am faced with the problem of trying to have Ozone 9 act upon all of the stems whilst having Cubase independently 'listen' to all my stems as I export them out as separate stem Masters (I know a lot of libraries have 'in-house' mastering engineers but some of the libraries out there do not hence my need to master my own stems).
Ozone 9 does not have a sidechain functionality to connect all the stems whilst being exported (so the stems cannot listen to one another whilst simultaneously being affected by Ozone's processing) and nor can Cubase look ahead at my Stereo Output in order to allow Ozone 9's processing to affect the stems as they are being batch exported. So I am left with the option of mastering each stem individually which of course means that Ozone 9's processing acts differently upon each separate stem track than it does when all the tracks are playing together - this in turn causing each mastered stem to be printed off completely off the mark and when summed together they are, sonically, radically altered.
Placing an instance of Ozone 9 on every stem would be utterly counter intuitive as it would use an insane amount of CPU which would in effect freeze my DAW, (Ozone 9 seems to be devised as a processing suite which needs only one instance loaded into a DAW in order to master the mix).
Mihkel's insightful video highlights the problem within Cubase which is, any tracks in the chain placed after the group channels that you are batch exporting (stems in this case) are ignored in the export process and I can find no solution to working around this problem.
Every tutorial I have seen on the internet seems to point towards preparing your stems for a Mastering engineer to do this job for you but I need to 'be the mastering engineer' due to a lack of financial capacity to pay anyone else.
If anyone has any idea what I may do to rectify this problem then I would be eternally grateful.
As a caveat I am aware that the mastered stems will ultimately be a little bit different to the overall Stereo master but in my case, the stems are so far off that it makes them useless as product. I am also aware that there is a great deal of information regarding this topic but non of it clearly identifies and answers this specific problem and so hopefully my question will not seem repetitively tiresome
I have attached a couple of screenshots in case that helps clarify my workflow.
Many thanks,
Anthony