Cubase 15: Rebalance, Remix and ReSample Made Easy

Your newly created stems are neatly organised within a Folder with the full functionality of their respective audio tracks available for level adjustment or other processing.

Cubase Pro 15’s new stem separation tool can breathe new life into old projects!

If recording is a long‑standing passion, the odds are that you have an extensive collection of older musical projects on tape, vinyl, CD/DVD or old hard drives — or maybe just in stereo audio files ‘somewhere’. However carefully we might have tried to archive those projects, returning to the multitracks isn’t always possible. We may have lost them, or lost touch with whoever looked after them, or maybe we no longer have the machines or software to get what we need from them. So there will be many occasions when all we have access to is the old stereo mix and a feeling of ‘if only I could change X, Y or Z...’

Stem

Where once all we could hope for was a simple remaster, with perhaps a bit of judicious EQ, compression/limiting and maybe a touch of stereo widening to improve the result in such circumstances, the arrival of stem separation a few years ago opened more doors to us. This technology still feels like magic to me, though there are now so many options that it’s easy to take for granted. Importantly, there have been rapid advances in the quality of stem separation in recent years, and Steinberg, the makers of Cubase, have been a key player with their SpectraLayers Pro software.

Having stem separation directly within Cubase Pro 15 makes for a very easy workflow.Cubase Pro/Artist users have had access to the bundled streamlined version, SpectraLayers One/Go, for some time but Cubase Pro 15 took things a further step forward by directly integrating stem separation into the Cubase feature set. So, if you want to breathe a bit of new life into a stereo mix where you have no means of revisiting the original multitrack project, how far can you now go with Cubase Pro 15?

The Separate Stems command is in the main Audio menu. You don’t get as many options as you might in the full version of SpectraLayers Pro (SLP) or, for example, iZotope’s RX, but you can generate up to four stems: vocals, drums, bass and the catch‑all ‘other’. Once executed on a selected audio clip, the process runs quickly and, to me at least, the results are closer to SLP’s Fast mode than its upmarket High mode. When completed, the stems are placed on individual tracks in a new Folder, directly beneath the original clip.

Get Clean

So, what’s the quality of the stem separation like? Well, I’ve supplied some short audio examples for you to audition (https://sosm.ag/cubase-0826). These are based on an extract from a stereo mix of an electronic pop project. This might be quite a common type of target for ‘unmixing’ but, equally, with ambience effects on the vocals, and a combination of both lead and backing vocals, it’s also not an easy one for stem separation tools to cope...