One of the really impressive elements about the Unmix feature is that when all the stems play together there’s no artefacts…
Something i’m curious about, let me know if Spectralayers has this ability… Could a mastering engineer potentially “unmix” a song they receive, then treat the stems separately (EQ, comp, etc) and then when it’s all played together there’s still no artefacts? Or does EQ’ing the individual stems introduce artefacts and phasing straight away in this context?
I don’t own Spectralayers yet so i can’t test this myself. But if it has this ability then shutup and take my money
In my opinion, there wouldn’t be too many artifacts in that scenario, in terms of SpectraLayers directly causing them. Of course, additional phasing or other side effects might be introduced based upon what plugin effects and / or EQing you apply and how good the separation was at the time of doing the unmixing, and the nature of the source audio material. But phasing and artifacts would be a concern in any standard mix too - so IMO you wouldn’t be treating SpectraLayers-derived stems very differently.
SpectraLayers won’t give you perfect stems, perfectly separated, every time, if that’s what you were expecting. In other words it doesn’t perform miracles! and the success of the results certainly is highly dependent on the source material. But the separation and possible artifacts incurred will be better than most.
As @JuergenP suggests, do a test drive to be sure it matches your expectations.
The moment you change the stems with eq or compressors or whatever they will no longer sum to an artefact free entirety.
Each stem has its artefacts that will not be noticed when played together with all the other stems, if untouched.
Especially processing with compressors will ’multiply’ these artefacts so they will be more (or less) noticeable, even when summing the stems.
But SL will still be of great help for remastering.
Some of the Unmix Song artefacts could be minimized before applying compressors, Unmix Levels could be used to clean a stem (from noise).
De-reverb could be used on stems to prepare for applying other or better reverbs in a pre-remastering.
The drum stem could be further ’unmixed’ with ReBeat e.g. for more eq, comp & reverb treatment of specific drums, or even drum replacement.
And so on…
Just use your ears and watchout for artefacts.
So in my experience SL is a very useful tool in the remaster process.
Ok yeah that’s about what I was expecting. The warbly “underwater” artefact sounds are a part of the stems, no way around that, but as long as there’s no phasey comb filtering going on then it’s totally workable imo, which is exciting.
I think if I keep it subtle then I’ll be safe. I’m talking max 3db EQ moves, maybe a transient designer here and there, maybe a comp from time to time. But mostly will use the brush tools.
E.g. my current use-case that motivated me to go seek a tool like this in the 1st place: I’m mastering a surf rock album, kinda proggy, all instrumental, in the 2nd track there’s a guitar that peaks REALLY loud in some parts, so much so that I had to turn my monitors down cos it hurt my ears. There’s probably 8-10 main peaks in the 2-3k range that stab the ear.
I considered going down the route of getting the mix engineer to fix it in the mix, but the mix engineer is a member of the band and he’s done a good job but he’s not a professional, he mixed it in Adobe Audition 2015, so I’d have to guide him with screenshots on what settings to use on a dynamic EQ plugin, there’d be a lot of back and forth and trial and error, tedious and time consuming. But if I can do it myself in Spectralayers and save him the hassle, then I’m doing my job of giving him peace of mind and getting it finished.
So I’ll unmix it and tame the peaks of the guitar stem with the eraser tool on a weak setting. I had a little test run with it last night and it still sounded natural to me. Think I overdid it the first time so I’ll try again tonight with weaker setting on the eraser tool.
Anyway I’m not looking for advice here I just wanted to tell my story haha. I’m excited to have this tool in my arsenal now, it gives me capabilities that I think are gonna impress and bewilder clients, which is fun and good for business!
