Naming Stems

There will come a point in your career where you will need to deliver stems. Stems are typically handed off to a label, a post-production company, music director for a film, even the artist for archival purposes. We should all be stemming pretty much all of our mixes and pretty much everyone dreads the process.

It’s labor intensive, it’s detail oriented, it’s repetitive. Most platforms now have options to automate the process but you still need to make decisions, you still need to check your work. It’s better than it used to be but it’s still a long way from being good.

But as someone who has delivered tons of stems and someone who has received tons of stems, I wanted to give you two pieces of advice. First, get a batch editor. It’s something anyone dealing with lots of audio files should just have.

Second, do the receiving engineer a huge solid. Don’t just put the song name in a folder and dump the files in there. Name the audio files with a song name, the tempo, and a version number.

And here’s the most important thing, put the track name first. The DAW is going to truncate those track names when I import them and if you don’t, I’m going to look at hundreds of tracks called My Cool Song 120 BPM. Sometimes it’s the little things that make the engineer happy to work with you and for me, that’s one of them.