How I stem master a whole album in one project

I’m a full-time mastering engineer, and I run a commercial studio with a team of four people in Madrid. One of our main differentiators is that 80% of the work we do is stem mastering. Unconventional, right?

Here is one of my approaches to stem mastering albums.

Last year, Recycled J came to us for stem mastering on what is easily one of the most special albums in Spanish music of the year: San Jorge. Most of the mixing was done by PMP, while some other tracks were mixed by Selecta and Alex Cappa. Since Pedro (PMP) is a fantastic mixer, he made my life much easier, and every single song sounded superb.

Why stem master an album?

Stem mastering lets us work on the entire album as if it were a single song (the screenshot of the session shows the layout).

We set each song in its own folder, respecting the track-list order, and each folder has its own mastering chain. But we can adjust each element individually, since we have access to the main groups of each song.

For example, if I feel the vocals have gotten a little quieter in one mix, or the low end is not punching enough compared to another song, I can rebalance everything quickly and easily. Rinse and repeat until I find common ground.

This creates outstanding coherence between songs, making the album feel like one.

Your ears don’t get tired

The best part of working on the whole album in one project? My ears don’t get tired.

I can switch songs every 10 to 15 minutes of work, or as soon as I start having doubts. This way I work on the whole album at once, and switching tracks resets my ears. As a result, I feel very confident about my decisions.

Why Reaper

Special shout-out to Reaper. I was unable to do this in any other DAW.

The CPU optimization is from another world. I work at 96 kHz with a 512 buffer size, and I never need to raise the buffer size or reduce the sample rate. It just works.