Unlock Creative Flexibility with Shorts, Loops, and Stems in PremiumBeat Tracks

PremiumBeat’s studio-quality music, extensive library, and affordable pricing make it an easy choice for creators. But once you explore the shorts, loops, and stems included in many track downloads, you may find yourself immersed in a world of creative possibilities.

Not every track includes these features, so here’s how to identify which ones do:

On the far right of each music track in the search results, beneath the Download button, look for the “Includes” dropdown. It lists the additional assets—like shorts, loops, and stems—available with that selection.

For example, the track “Buzzin” by Wolves includes 15–60 second shorts, four separate stems, and eight loops—each available for download.

PremiumBeat Shorts

Along with full tracks, PremiumBeat’s shorts are also available as preview downloads before purchase. This allows you to test how a shorter segment fits into your project—saving time and streamlining your creative process.

Simply download the 15, 30 or 60 second short that works for you, and insert it into any NLE behind your footage.

PremiumBeat Loops

Creating a seamless music loop takes time, but luckily PremiumBeat has already done that work for you!

Loops are great for low-key background music where they lend a certain mood to the video and yet are not overpowering enough for the listener to actually notice that the music is looping.

Loops are also great for tying two scenes together with the same mood.

Loops are only available after purchase, however.

PremiumBeat Stems

Stems have been described as “true gold” by PremiumBeat enthusiasts for the latitude that they afford a creator to tweak and perfect the music behind a scene.

Perhaps you find a great track that works perfectly in your project except for one single repeating note, or a vocal, or anything that you wish weren’t there. If you download the available stems files with your PremiumBeat track, you now have access to isolated sections of the music, and often each individual instrument. You can turn one off, reverse another, mix a certain tone out, lower the volume of a loud note, and change the music to completely match the tone of your project.

Another issue that creators run into is that they will find a great piece of music, not realizing that many others have found the same music just as applicable, and soon that track is heard played in multiple commercials and adverts. Stems can help with that by allowing each user to individualize the music to the mood of the project, so that it is not immediately recognized as a “copy” of another publicly heard composition.

Stems are also only available after purchase. You’ll want to check beforehand to see if your desired track does indeed offer stems, however, as not every single piece on PremiumBeat has them. This can be seen on the download preview, where it will say “Stems, Available after purchase”. Then, once you’ve paid for your music, on the download screen you’ll be presented with all of your options, including the stems.

For our project, when we hit the Stems WAV file button, a zip file downloaded containing each instrument track. We were presented individual files of this track that included the bass beat, the symbol and high piano notes, percussion and tympani, an intermittent high-pitched ring, strings, and mid-range piano notes.

Once these stem files are brought into your NLE, you’ll start to get a sense of the potential for creativity here. You can turn each instrument on and off as you wish to get a good sense of which audio tracks will need to be changed in order to sculpt your desired result.

For our project, we needed to bolster a scene of burglars creeping through a residence, with just the right music in the background. We thought that we’d found the perfect track. Well, nearly the perfect track, except that about 7 seconds in, the music swells to add a strings section and a tinkling piano. For the specific video clip that we were working with, we simply didn’t need for the music to be so full of instruments. Thankfully, with the stems option, once we’d uploaded the stems into our NLE, it was simple to dim the sound of one instrument to reflect the quiet creeping of the actors in the scene, and to quash the other instruments altogether.

Because the spies were calmly creeping through the house, we desired to keep up the suspense by toning the music down. We eliminated everything except the first bass stem, and then reduced the audio gain on the mid-range piano notes stem by about 20 decibels. For this clip, we only need our tweaked version using 2 stems in the “Converging Elements” download. But in the next scene, when there is more action, we can introduce a couple other stems to highlight that action, allowing us to create a theme for the entire project.

The amount of control given by PremiumBeat’s shorts, loops, and stems means that we can use the same music track in several different ways in our project to create an underlying musical theme that still expresses many facets of the footage that we put it behind.

Hit the sound icon to hear our result…

PremiumBeat’s quality library offering of shorts, loops, and stems on most tracks is especially convenient for the creator who wants to put stock music behind their footage and yet still retain a large amount of creative control to modify the final product. If you need fast and customizable sound design in your project, a PremiumBeat subscription will become a great tool to polish up any composition.

Learn more with these PremiumBeat articles at Creative COW:

PremiumBeat – Flexible Unlimited Music for Creators

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