This can give you greater control over the reverb during mastering.įor example, you might want the reverb to only affect certain instruments or you might want to use a different type of reverb for each instrument group, such as a plate reverb for the vocals and a room reverb for the drums, and then set the volume or the send amount of these to different levels. If you want to apply reverb during the mastering process, I would highly recommend putting the reverb on the individual stems and not the whole master. Nowadays a very popular form of mastering is stem mastering, where instead of one stereo mix, the mastering engineer is working with individual stems, which gives more control to the engineer.

For example, a stereo drum stem might be a single audio track that includes the kick, the snare, the toms, the hi-hat and the overheads and all the processing effects that have been applied to these individual tracks. Stems often combine different instruments together.

A stem is an already processed, mixed and bounced track.įor instance, a lead vocal stem is a lead vocal track that already has processing applied to it, such as EQ, compression, reverb or even delay.

The terms “stem” and “multitrack” are often confused with each other. This is the purpose of stem mastering.Īre you not familiar with stem mastering? No problem.

The benefit of applying reverb to individual stems instead of the whole master is that this way you have more control over the reverb and you can process the different instrument groups separately.

Eq master track