Solved Separate stem for effect?

[hieroglyph]

I've been working on mixing a song and added a Universal Audio echo effect to a small section of the vocal track. I'm not sure of the correct vocabulary but I added the effect as muted envelope and simply unmuted where I wanted the effect to appear. I like it and think it sounds great. But when I go to export the stems, instead of writing the echo effect to the vocal track, like regular volume and mute envelopes, it creates a separate stem just for the effect. Here are some screenshots:

This is the actual envelope. As you can see, I just unmuted the effect on a few words and then back to mute.

Here is the console view where the UA effect bus is next to the vocal.

I'm not sure if I did it the correct way, but I like how it sounds. Only when I export the stems, I get a stem for the effect and its separate from the vox stem.

I'm sure there is a very simple solution. How do I get a vocal stem with the UADx tape echo effect embedded so I don't have a separate effect stem?

 

[hieroglyph]

For clarification. I know that you can choose individual tracks or channels when exporting stems. When I exported with the effect channel, I could re-import them into a new project and the UA effect channel would appear in the console view and the song would play with the effect. But when I exported stems without the UA effect channel and re-imported into a new project, the effect did not follow.

When I do a mixdown, of course everything works fine.

However I wish to send the stems to an associate for further mixing and he uses Logic. I don't know if he will get the same results when importing my stems into Logic. I don't want to waste his time or my money by sending trial and error stems and working it out on the clock.

The only thing I can think of is to do a mixdown of just the vox and effect channels but when I choose export mixdown, I am not able to select ONLY the vox and effect channel. It forces me to mixdown the entire plate when all I wanted was an enchilada. Can I mixdown these two channels without deleting all the others? Or do I simply need to save a new project with just those two channels, mixdown, and then use the mixed-down file as the vocal stem?

I feel like I'm overcomplicating all this, which I am very good at doing.

 

[SwitchBack]

My guess: An FX bus is a separate bus entity which is no longer part of the channel(s) feeding into it. So it gets a separate stem.

If you want to have the effect as part of the channel's stem then insert the effect in the channel itself. You can use the splitter tool if you had additional processing on the FX bus. Drag&drop is your friend.

 

[hieroglyph]

My guess: An FX bus is a separate bus entity which is no longer part of the channel(s) feeding into it. So it gets a separate stem.

If you want to have the effect as part of the channel's stem then insert the effect in the channel itself. You can use the splitter tool if you had additional processing on the FX bus. Drag&drop is your friend.

Thank you for your reply.

I did previously think about the method you mentioned but if I insert the effect directly onto the vox channel, wouldn't it be full time 'on'? I only want the effect for a few words in a single verse, not for the entire duration of the song. Hence creating a mute envelope for the effect.

 

[SwitchBack]

Most effects allow you to automate the dry/wet setting. Or, when you use the Splitter, inserting the Mixtool before the effect gives you an automatable 48dB level swing.

NB. Exactly for this sort of applications it would be nice if PreSonus would add an automatable mute button plugin to the stock toolkit, with a tiny fade-in/fade-out maybe. Should be the simplest plug-in ever to make.

 

[Wolfger]

If you export the stems and select "tracks" as the sources option the send effect will be included in the bounce. I just tried, it works.
Selecting the "tracks" option will export the track as you hear it when soloing it.

 

[hieroglyph]

Most effects allow you to automate the dry/wet setting. Or, when you use the Splitter, inserting the Mixtool before the effect gives you an automatable 48dB level swing.

Thank you again for your time. I was unable to figure out your suggestion but I still got it to work eventually using a different method.

 

[hieroglyph]

If you export the stems and select "tracks" as the sources option the send effect will be included in the bounce. I just tried, it works.
Selecting the "tracks" option will export the track as you hear it when soloing it.
View attachment 977

After like 3 hours of experimenting, I kind of got your recommendation to work. It was not as straightforward as I thought it would be and I had to change the way I applied the effect.

I went to an earlier saved version of my song and instead of adding the effect with a mute envelope, I used a different Joey Gilder method and duplicated the vocal track. I then cut and pulled down the section that needed echo and added the effect to that track. I exported the two tracks as stems, like you mentioned, then re-imported them. After doing this, I assigned both vocal tracks to a bus and exported the bus as a stem. It was a roundabout way of getting my vox stem without a separate effect stem like I had before. Mission accomplished.

The reason it took 3 hours was that I was concurrently attempting to use the stem separator on a guitar overdub to separate some guitar from a dog barking where a semi-distant room mic was placed to capture an electric guitar amp. The funny thing was that the dog growled at the same time I sang the lyrics "beasts of the land", so I kept the dog growl and extracted/removed a sustained guitar note that was getting in the way of hearing the dog growl. Talk about coincidence and synchronicity, lmfao. My friend's dogs were play fighting between the amp mic and room mic while overdubs were being recorded in another room. It fit perfectly with the lyrics and context of my song so I am keeping the dog noises. Mission accomplished.

I am certain I still overcomplicated the solution but I did find a solution. Thanks everyone for your suggestions and encouragement.