Logic Pro: Stem Splitter

The ability to split a single audio file into its constituent musical elements is a technological development which has been available in some DAWs and via third-party software for some time. And in Logic 11, it’s now available to us natively too. In this episode, I’ll show you how it works and, believe me, this is a function you’ll need less than 2 minutes to master.

The parts which can be extracted are Vocals, Drums, Bass and Other and, as we’ll see, the musical potential for this feature is huge. Not only can we easily extract vocal parts for remixing, for instance, there are also major benefits for media composers working to picture where the voiceover and temp music have been pre-mixed.


00:00 Intro
00:33 Pop track playback
01:34 How to use Stem Splitter
02:25 Playback of ‘split’ audio
03:20 Vocals playback
04:39 Drums Stem
05:10 Bass Stem
05:58 Other Stem
07:48 Movie Import
09:11 Stem Split on Movie File
10:07 Voiceover playback
10:34 Analysing the other Stems
12:06 Understanding why VO extraction is so helpful
13:15 Final thoughts