How do I group tracks on my DAW?

When you import your music productions into our system, it requires you to divide the instrumentals into sole- or groupings of tracks. If you’re familiar with the Starmony concept, you know that our technology customizes the production to fit the vocalist in terms of style and key. Therefore, instrumentals must be grouped and labeled accordingly - for example, the key of the chord instruments will need to be adjusted and therefore constitutes one group, whilst drums will remain in their original format regardless of key. Just like when you would adjust your productions key to a studio singer.

In this article, we will outline some guidelines as to how your tracks should be grouped together, and how you should label them in our system.

General guidelines

When you group the instrumentals from your DAW, we suggest that all chord instruments, drums, FX, percussion, and bass constitute one group each. Solo sounds that play a melody, for example, a synth or guitar solos, should be separated under the Synth category (sy1, sy2, etc.). It is important that you do not bounce your melodies together with chord instruments, as these are not always aligned and we require the ability to mute a melody track. If you are unsure of whether your riser ends or starts on a clear note, you should label it under synth. If your track contains elements with complex overtones - separate them.

If you have multiple instruments playing chords together, for example, a string, a pad, and a guitar, you can choose to either group them together or separate them. If you choose to separate them, we suggest you label them ci1, ci2, etc., where “ci” stands for Chord Instruments.

A general word of advice when grouping the tracks from your DAW, is to think about it from the vocalist's point of view. What would benefit the vocalist? Whether you choose to separate or group stems should be determined on the basis of when/if the user might want to mute elements to fit their vocals better.