Stem Mastering Piano House Explained

If you're looking to improve the mastering of your piano house tracks, you should take a look at stem mastering. In this one-hour video course, Groove3 instructor Larry Holcombe walks you through the process of mastering a piano house track from the beginning, allowing you to hear and see the benefits provided by using stems. Many of these same techniques and concepts can be applied to other genres as well. These videos are designed for beginning mastering engineers.

Videos

• Stem Preparation (06:38) - In this video, we create stems from the mixdown project of this piano house track, ready to dive into the stem mastering. This includes routing the parallel effects and spatial effects into busses for each instrument.

• Stem Macro Processing (10:21) - This video concentrates on processing the individual stems by creating macro changes in stereo width, volume, and tone.

• Dynamics & Vintage Processing (11:01) - Next up, we experiment with using channel strip emulations and tape saturation on our busses to drive and saturate the track. Pre-mastering bus compression is added next to hype up the mix and also enhance the groove using musical release times to tie the mix together.

• Clipping Busses (07:51) - We hard clip the busses subtly using Kazrog's KClip 3 next. This will take away some of the workload from the final limiter in the chain.

• Mastering Chain (14:12) - Once we have our bus processing dialed in, we create a bespoke mastering chain for the track with EQ, parallel compression, and harmonic excitation.

• Wrap Up (05:08) - Finally, we discuss some final thoughts on the clipping/limiting strategy for loudness.