Exporting stems and mix-buss compression – A workaround
Some mixing engineers like to have compression or even limiting on their mix-buss. This is fine unless you want to export your mix into stems, especially when you decided for stem-mastering of your song. (If you don’t know what stem mastering is, please read this first.) The problem is as follows: Let’s say you have your mixdown (brown) split into two stems, a so-called TV-stem (without vocals, here: blue), and all the vocals (yellowish). When your mixing engineer exports these two stems (blue, yellow), your mix-buss compressor (or limiter) behaves differently than during mixdown (where it is fed by the…
