Knowing how to make stems in Ableton Live is necessary if say your DAW like mine is Ableton Live and you want to submit me a song for my song mixing services. Okay okay, there are plenty of other reasons you may want to make stems, such as for taking tracks from one song to use in another or in a remix to share with someone else, etc.
Regardless of your motivation, let’s talk the very simple method for how to make stems in Ableton Live.
How to Make Stems in Ableton Live
Note that while this tutorial is focused on how to make stems in Ableton Live, the process is very similar for virtually any DAW. Essentially it comes down to just a few steps, so let’s begin with the first.
Step 1 – Label Your Tracks With Specificity
I’m a stickler for this one in particular as someone who receives stems for mixing regularly.
Ableton Live intuitively names stems when you render multiple tracks at once by the name of the Set followed by the name of the Track.
So a track named “Guitar” in a Set named “Mix 1” would be named “Mix 1 Guitar” when rendered.
While it’s very easy to simply go with the default names a DAW like Ableton Live creates when you create a new track like “Audio 1”, “Audio 2”, etc., this becomes very confusing when you’re rendering lots of stems at once.
Naming each track before you render saves you (or whomever you’re sending them to) a lot of time in having to go through in listening to each generically named stem after the fact and rename them. You might even include the tempo as part of the Set name as a reminder of what tempo these clips were recorded at as that can be useful in some cases down the road.
What will save you even more time is to create a template so everything is properly labeled before you even record or import your tracks with proper routing and some processing already in place:
Check out my tutorial on how to easily create a mixing template for more information.
Step 2 – Select The Tracks You Want to Export
Note that this step is only relevant if you just want to choose specific tracks to export. If you’re planning on rendering every single individual track in your mix, you can ignore this.
If you maybe have some scratch tracks or simply a number of tracks you don’t want to include, make sure you only select the ones you want to render.
In Windows, you simply hold the Ctrl key as you click each track to select the ones you want to include.
Regardless, it’s very important to note that whatever processing you have on those tracks will be rendered with the raw audio.
If you want that audio to be completely raw, I.E. no processing on them, then you need to turn off those effects on the tracks you want to render before that render.
Note that there’s a setting to include or exclude any master bus processing and return/send effects you have on those tracks which I’ll address in a moment, but the inserted effects will be “baked into” those rendered tracks.
Step 3 – Select Start and Length to Beginning of Set to End of Last Track
This is extremely important and another pet peeve of mine when it comes to receiving tracks.
Too often I’ll receive just the individual audio clips for a track, or just the span those clips take up.
When I or whomever is trying to import those stems, they’re all different lengths, not to mention there’s no indication of where or how they should align with one another.
When you’re specifying the length of the stems, select from 1.1.1 on the timeline (the very start of the set) through the end of the final playing track.
This will print every single stem for every track at the same length.
Yes this results in larger file sizes as you’re also rendering a lot of silence for some tracks, but it’s much cleaner and ensures everything aligns as it should and accounts for all potential scenarios.
Step 4 – Specify Additional Export Settings
You’ll find the section for how to make stems in the top half in the Export Audio/Video of Ableton Live:
The relevant settings here are:
Rendered Track
This is what we addressed in step 2. The options are:
Master
This renders a single mixed down track through the master. Any muted tracks will be ignored; it’s just any tracks which are actively feeding into the master bus.
All Individual Tracks
This is generally the setting you’ll want unless, like I mentioned in step 2, there are tracks you want to ignore. This renders every single track in your mix separated as if they were each in solo mode.
Note that this also bounces the master track as a separate track (you can spot this track as there’s no secondary name associated with a track, it’s simply the name of the Set).
Selected Tracks Only
Again and as mentioned in step 2, this only renders the tracks you’ve selected, and again as if each of them is solo’d. There’s no master in this case unless you select it with the individual tracks.
Specific Track
Lastly and unrelated to this tutorial on how to make stems in Ableton Live, you can choose a specific track to just render that track and that track alone as if it was in solo mode.
Render Start
This next parameter goes back to step 3.
99% of the time, you’ll want to set this point as 1.1.1. In other words, the beginning of your set.
Note that in Ableton Live if you select a length of time on the timeline before you bring up the “Export Audio/Video” feature, it will already have filled in the start time with the beginning point of that length you selected.
Render Length
We also covered this in step 3, but set this to run through the length of the final playing track in the mix. So if the final track ends at 102.2.4, set that as the length.
Note that again if you selected a length of time on the timeline, this length will already be populated with whatever length you set.
This is honestly the easiest way to set the right start time and render length, or highlighting a block of the time you want on the timeline.
Include Return and Master Effects
This parameter indicates whether or not you want those return tracks (Ableton’s aux tracks) as well as the master effects on.
Regarding the return effects, let’s say for example you have parallel compression on a return track and you’re blending some of that in with some of the tracks you want to render as stems. If you want that parallel compression included, tick this to “On”.
Regarding the master effects, let’s say you’ve got some glue compression on the master bus to add a little cohesiveness to the entire mix. This will be printed to the rendered stems if that parameter is set to “On” which probably isn’t the effect that you want in that case – just something to keep in mind.
If you want the rawest audio, make sure to keep this set to “Off”, not to mention remove any inserted audio effects on the tracks themselves.
Everything else is pretty standard. If you want the stems to be loopable, tick “On” for “Render as Loop”.
If you want every track set to mono for some reason, tick “On” for “Convert to Mono”.
If you want your audio normalized, meaning it attempts to set the volumes of every track to be roughly the same, tick “On” for “Normalize”.
I’d estimate +90% of the time when it comes to how to make stems, you’ll want to simply set the start time, the length, and keep every other parameter set to “Off” to get the rawest rendered audio.
After that all you need to do is specify the sample rate and bit depth and you’re good to go.
That’s all there is to know about how to make stems, especially in Ableton Live but virtually any DAW, so get to making those stems and have fun!
