Simple stem mastering rules no one shares, but everyone should know! 

Absolutely brilliant video Nicholas! I love your client focus and the respect you've emphasized to have for the stereo mix. I've totally encountered many of the same things. Especially vocal sibilance and the drawbacks of dealing with that on a master level. It always creates a compromise where the drums or other elements suffer. Access to the stems opens up so many more possibilities for cleaner adjustments and better overall outcomes. Another aspect that I really like about access to stems is when one is engineering for a very loud master. I shift most of the heavy lifting away from the mastering chain and onto the stems. Things such as clipping or saturation benefit greatly from being placed on less complex signals where less intermodulation is generated. And for plugins like the HG2-MS, you can finesse the saturation for each class of sound differently rather than trying to thread the needle on the master. I work as a mixer first, and many of my clients are coming to me with mixes where they're not 100% happy with them and want some adjustment. They don't always have the budget for me to do the track by track mix, so working with the stems is often a good compromise. Then mastering duties become exponentially easier when I have the stem project to work with. Awesome videos mate! Thanks for sharing your experience and insights.

This is also pretty much how I mix these days (with regards to order of operations). Start on the mix bus, then when I hit the enviable thing that needs more direct treatment I go down to the busses, and then when theres nothing left to do there and theres still things that could be done on indavidual tracks, only then will I go in to each track. I ofc have all the single track prep work done first. All my basic levels, panning etc etc first. But it stops me chasing my tail this way, where I spend hours doing something on a single track, but then buss and mixbus processes ruin or undo what I did on the single track making my double back ond eork a ton on the single track again. Ofc I will still tweak things if it needs, but it's rarely having to go back and do massive heavy lifting.

TIGHT! I knew these hand held, in your face videos would be on point!

Love the emphasis that just because you have stems and are given autonomy to adjust relative levels of something like a vocal, it doesn’t mean you are back in the mixing stage. I’m not someone who thinks producers should have to be mixers and mixers should have to be masters but I love the idea of the modern artist taking as much responsibility as they can for the sounds that are being sculpted in a track, and if a producer can get a mix that captures the vibe the song is calling for, more power to them, that’s amazing. An eye opening video every artist who dabbles with mixing should watch-I think there are two but both are so instructive-is the mixcon masterclasses by Jeff Ellis (Frank Ocean mixer among many other great acts) Seeing his process blew my mind since his policy when mixing is to receive the whole original project file in the daw the approved mix was made in. This process seems to encapsulate the ethos of taking a certain duty of care as you say to respect what the artist wishes and to see the specific mixing decisions that got them this far, and now they’re coming to you, the mixing engineer to beef up the essences of those ideas and flesh them out. Anyways, good stuff. It’s amazing how much your philosophical approach can be a game changer in what seems like such a technical pursuit.

I Totally encourage the same methodology. Specially when the album is complete, i encourage the mix engineer to open-up a stem session (with their masterbus exports) and check for the integrity of the album. Sometimes when we're in a certain mix project that has been worked too much, people get lost inside details, while the track might need important changes with gainstaging, engineers try solving problems with eq which will sound worse, while it's a gainstage problem. This is also a good QC before mastering, also hearing the tracks one next to the other is a great thing to check

Thanks for the video Mr. BigPhatMasters!

I think that if the goals and objectives are clear, the way you decide to master wouldn't have any negative effect in the final results. If you think you can do a better job with stem mastering, then you should go for it. When mastering, if objectives are not clear, it's very easy to destroy the balance of the mix even when working with a stereo mix...

Thanks! Great video. Best/Mathias

So here's the question: What do you do when the 2-track is broken in a way that only separating the stems can fix, but the artist has lost the stems/project files to re-render stems from?

Let me work for you ! I would love to learn more from you !

Please keep in mind that perfection isn’t the goal. If you correct all the errors they made, you could be erasing the signature of their sound. Instead of evening everything, work to make their signature, their errors, sound appropriate. Enhance their idea. I’m old and the music of my youth all had mixing errors. Just done in a variety of ways. Which sounded good, partly because they were errors. Deviations from the norm. Today, we have everything figured out. And everything is far less varied and creative.

You can organize your elements into buses, then changing to whatever they want should be a piece of cake

Not to trash anybody, but if a mix engineer is sending out stems for mastering, perhaps they need more practice.

I love your videos man but please no more free cam lol. Use 2 or 3 cams if you can on a "tripod" and swich between that. yay 🤘🤘

Couldn't this all come under the heading of house keeping? It's not mixing..it's getting things ready to mix.. I would want to do all this before I start mixing personally