Help avoiding offset when Rendering Stems in Ableton
nachtPilger
Mexico CityPosts: 2
Hi everyone, I guess my question is more of an Ableton question, but i figured that maybe someone here had had to face this situation before and maybe i could get some guidance here.
Im working on getting some 16 bar Stem loops to play them on my Deluge. I tried multiple ways of doing this in ableton but everyone of them is slightly wrong. The most common issue is what i stated on the title, so ill try to explain it in detail.
I have a song i want to get stems from, i select multiple 16 bar loops to get the stems, and then i selecte the whole section in arrangement view, and then render them using "Render Selected Tracks only" with the Include Return and Master effects, (that way the effects that i have on my Mastering Chain are rendered with the selected Tracks. The problem is that after rendering i end up with files that are all slightly offset by a small amount, im pretty sure thats the delay added by the plugins in the master channel. I could grab each stem and try to remove the silence offset by changing the start point but that leaves me with 2 issues, one is that its easy to see where that offset ends if its a sound that starts on 1.1 (like a Kick for example) but if the sound doesnt start right away (Like an Open Hat) then it takes more effort to line up the sound. The second issue is that if i record a 16 bar loop, and i remove a small offset from the begining that same amount of sound is now missing from the end.
offset + 16 bar loop => (if we remove the offset) 16 bar loop - offset
So that means if i want to remove that offset from the begining of the track i need to remove it, and then crop it again in live, which i wish i could avoid.
I've tried other solutions like just rendering the individual tracks without the master channel, and i dont get that offset, but then im missing the master channel's plugins, and im having issues on how to compensate the volume of each track, and i end up with a lot of tracks that are quiet on the Deluge, so quiet in fact that the waveform barely shows on the Song View and its very hard to know what is on a track if the waveform color is not showing at all 
So anyways, enough of my ranting, have any of you bumped into this issue? what have you done to solve it? do you have any ideas on what approach i could take? I would love to end with a process that i can use for all of my tracks to start working on my live act.
Thanks for reading all of this! im looking forward to reading your responses
Answers
What effects are you using on your master chain? I use Ableton and haven’t noticed any noticeable delays from being processed. But I do mostly only use native plugins.
If you move the effects to the track itself then freeze and flatten do the delays still appear? If so you could maybe use track delays to offset it at that point or move the start points all by the same amount.
But if your only problem with the unaffected stems is low level, you can just throw a compressor and/or limiter on the tracks and that shouldn’t introduce any delay
Well on the Master chain i normally have a couple of EQs, some Bus Compressor like SPL IRON, and PRO-L, i notice that if i disable the mastering Chain, i dont have any offset when recording tracks. I could in theory just copy those plugins over to each group im getting stems, and that actually might be a reasonable solution, the big difference is that the bus compressors and the limiter might work differently because the channels are not being added up and it most probably wouldnt hit the thresholds of those plugins
Well I think the same issue will exist from exporting separate stems. They won’t all be hitting the same thresholds individually. Exporting stems usually isn’t the time for mastering. I’d consider just normalizing. And compress each stem individually as necessary. And native Ableton compressor shouldn’t add any delay.