5 Innovative Uses for PEEL STEMS

Learn how to make the most of PEEL STEMS with these five innovative uses for our powerful real-time stem separation plugin

PEEL STEMS is best known for its primary purpose, which is to separate stems in real-time. But did you know that PEEL STEMS is capable of much more than just splitting stems in your DAW? In this article, we’ll uncover five innovative uses for PEEL STEMS and how you can make the most of the versatile plugin in your next project.

5 Innovative Uses for PEEL STEMS

1. Accompany Individual Instruments to Beat Writer’s Block

We recently published a blog article in which we explored six ways to beat writer’s block using zplane plugins. In case you missed it, in point two, we explained how you can use PEEL STEMS to find fresh sources of inspiration when faced with a case of writer’s block. We strongly recommend checking out the full article, but here’s an overview of that particular technique.

The idea is to use a reference track to lay down the foundations of your own original composition. Find a reference track in a similar style to what you want to create, load the track into your DAW, and place PEEL STEMS on the channel. Now solo one of the stems by holding Shift and clicking on the corresponding On/Off button.

2. Perform More In-depth Mix Referencing and Analysis

Mix referencing is a hugely important tool for music producers and mix engineers. Frequently checking your production or mix against a reference track can help you to reset your ears, and can provide a sonic framework against which you can check your own composition.

You can use reference tracks in the traditional sense by loading a professionally mixed and mastered track into your DAW, matching the level, and A/Bing it against your own mix. This is really important as it gives you an idea of how your complete composition compares to a similar track, but what if you want to reference a specific part of another track, such as the drums, vocals, or bass?

This is made extremely simple with PEEL STEMS. Simply load an instance of the plugin on your reference track and solo the stem you want to isolate. You can solo multiple elements to listen more closely to the relationship between different parts, such as Drums and Bass or Vocals and Other.

If you want to listen to reference tracks in even finer detail, you can use PEEL STEMS’ spectral and spatial isolation functionality to do that. Click anywhere in the Soundfield Display to create a new Focus Frame, and click and drag its position and borders to select which parts of the frequency and stereo domain you want to isolate.

3. Independently process individual stems within a sample

One solution could be to apply a high-pass EQ or filter to remove the kick drum from the sample, however, this would also mean compromising the sample’s bassline. Instead, we can use two instances of PEEL STEMS to remove the low end from only the drums while leaving the bassline intact.

To do this, add an instance of PEEL STEMS to the audio channel containing the loop, then duplicate the channel. On the first channel, solo the Bass stem by holding shift and clicking the corresponding On/Off button. On the second channel, solo the Drums.

We can now apply processing to the bassline and drums independently. In our case, we’ve applied a high-pass filter to the drum sound, thus removing the kick drum from the sample. Using this sample stem splitting technique, we could apply other processing to the drums that we don’t want to apply to the bassline, including reverb or stereo widening.

PEEL STEMS makes it possible to get creative with your routing and signal processing, and allows you to dive in and manipulate audio in ways that weren’t possible before.

4. Apply Any Effect in Mid/Side or Multiband

As well as being able to independently process individual instruments, you can also use PEEL STEMS to process an audio signal based on its frequency and stereo information. Like the previous technique, this is useful if you want to process specific parts of an audio signal while leaving the rest of the signal unprocessed. For example, you may wish to apply distortion to the upper frequencies of a signal, or reverb to only the sides.

For this technique, we’re going to use PEEL STEMS’ built-in spectral filter and dual stereo outputs to apply reverb to only the sides of a piano loop. Create a new Focus Frame by clicking anywhere in the Soundfield Display. PEEL STEMS will now output everything within the Focus Frame. We can drag the borders of the frame so that we only hear the center or middle of the signal.

Next, we want to route the second stereo output, containing the sides of the signal, to a separate audio channel. Each DAW handles this process slightly differently. We’ll be doing it in Ableton Live 12, but you can find full DAW-dependent instructions in the plugin manual.

In Ableton Live, we’ve created a new audio channel and selected the channel containing the piano loop as its input type. Then, we selected the InvOut – PEEL STEMS input channel and turned input monitoring on for that channel. By soloing the second channel, we should now hear only the signal outside of PEEL STEMS’ focus frame.

5. Create Quick Transition Effects

Once again, this next technique uses PEEL STEMS’ spectral filter. This time, we’re using it similar to how you might use a traditional filter to create transition effects that lead up to a new section of an arrangement.

Place PEEL STEMS on an instrument or bus, or even the master bus. Click in the Soundfield Display to create a new Focus Frame, then experiment with dragging the frame around to create unique sweeping effects.

Once you’ve found a movement you’re happy with, enable automation recording in your DAW and record the movement in. It might take some fine-tuning to get it right, but the result is a characteristic spectral sweeping effect that sounds very different from a traditional low or high-pass filter. Try inverting the Focus Frame to get a completely different tone.