Serato Stems - Worth It?

[KLH]

I use Traktor so I haven't experienced Serato Stems just yet. What does everyone think about it?

[farhanashraf]

its changed the game completely. my transitions are so much easier to do now

[Mark_Spit]

Personally I’m having a lot of fun with it. While stems certainly isn’t necessary, they bring a great amount of creativity to your mixes.

One thing of note, is I find you really need to have your cue points set up properly - meaning: a cue point for the a capella, a cue point for the drums, melody and baseline. It also helps to have a separate sub-controller like the DDJ-SP1 / XP2 so you can use the stems function and cue points simultaneously. I keeps you from fumbling around with the performance pad function buttons. My DVS setup is as follows: DDJ-SP1 for Stems control and Novation Dicers for cue points.

Seeing how you’re a Traktor user, you may want to wait for their version; apparently they’re working with iZotope to get real time stems on the platform; with any luck, it’ll be less resource hungry than the Serato version. Also, I imagine you would be able to use the old D2 controller if you can still find them.

Keep in mind, Traktor has also gone the subscription route so I don’t know how that will affect you when they finally release it.

[djknowledge]

i love it. i just wish it came out 13 years ago when i actually had time to dj. and for when i wanted to sample a track but couldnt because it had drums and an 8band eq filter combo wasnt cutting it. It really is amazing tho. It's not perfect depending on how much stuff a track has going on but for the most part it gets the job done. it works better than the actual izotope plugin version for daw's (music rebalance)

[DJ Matt]

I use Traktor so I haven't experienced Serato Stems just yet. What does everyone think about it?

I use Virtual DJ, I dunno why but it seems like people act like it doesn't exist until Serato does it.

but Stems have definitely changed everything for me in DJing , even using it once made me feel that it is hard to imagine working without them

All in all, it has made mixing more natural, because you can do it all off the cuff, you don't have to wait for certain points in the song.

you can say, ok after this chorus ill just cut everything out and keep the drums, and bring in the other song.
or if I'm bringing in a song in the same key, the intro might have a bassline that is slightly jarring with the song that is playing, in the past id have to use the hi-pass filter to deal with it, but now as standard il remove the instruments and just keep the percussion when I'm doing that.
or you can swap the drums or the melody, or just keep the drums from the previous song looping for a while over the new song to make it a smoother mix
or you can drop everything and just keep the last line of the chorus in acapella before slamming into a new song. loads of new options like that.