Ableton - Keep your channel faders low and the Master at 0db!
I know some of you have heard otherwise, but this is a pretty convincing article.
Here is an excerpt:
Almost weekly I am asked for mixing advice. Usually after a few probing questions I discover that 90% of the people unhappy with their sound are making the same mistake. They are completely overdriving their internal summing bus! Take all your song’s individual channel faders and bring them at least -12db and keep the Master fader at 0dB at all times.
Look at your DAW’s mixer. Now imagine the volume of your individual channel fader’s adding up from left to right heading to your Master. If you keep your channel faders close to zero surely your Master will go over odB and clip. As we all know any clipping in the digital realm is very bad.
Why not keep your channel faders all hot and turn the master down? Because you will still be overdriving cheap plug-ins. Well written plug-ins can handle a hot signal but some of the coolest freeware and to be honest some big name effects clip internally when even a warm signal is shot at them. The worst part about this happening is there is no visual warning. All you know is your mixes just sound like crap.
If you ran a test overdriving one plug-in and pushing a channel fader too hot you may not notice anything. But keep your levels low in a complicated song with over 10 channels and you will definitely notice a major improvement.
LINK TO FULL ARTICLE: http://www.wiretotheear.com/2008/01/25/keep-your-channel-faders-low-and-...
wondering if anyone encountered this inconsistency in the article:
He states that keeping the channel faders down will prevent internal clipping in certain plugins - but I don't see how that is the case, unless he is talking about plugins on the master channel, or on some other intermediary mixdown channel that the channel in question is routed to - Because if he is referring to plugins in the channel in question, adjusting the channel fader (which is at the very end of the plugin chain) won't have any effect whatsoever on the possibility of clipping the plugins. The input level before each plugin is what determines whether or not the signal will create clipping inside the plugin, so if you are concerned about clipping your plugins, you need to keep an eye on the level at the very beginning of the signal path for the channel, and then between each additional plugin that might be on the channel. The simplest way to do that would be to drop a "utility" plugin with some gain reduction at the beginning of the signal chain when you have plugins that you are worried about clipping, and then compensate for the lost volume at the end with another utility, or a compressor/limiter.
Now there might be other benefits to keeping the channel faders low-ish, I don't know enough about the math behind ableton's 32-bit summing to say...
Nice one, thanks for clearing that up, I’ll definitely try it.
I’ll have to have a search around the options menus of Cubase SX 2 to see if it has a similar function to set the faders to -12db, though I’m sure it would.
This would somewhat revolutionalise my mixing as usually I try and keep my kick drums hitting close to 0db, and mix around that, continually dropping the master fader as the song builds.
Lyrics For Music Lovers Yes, this is absolutely a must thing to know. I suspect a lot of those who claim that their mixes in Ableton Live are muddy are indeed overloading the bus. Not that Ableton has tried to clean up some of the issues in Live 7.0, but it’s better to be safe.
I wish Live had the same feature Logic has had for ages where you could select multiple or all volume sliders, and when you move down one, the others also go down. This is a quick way to adjust a group or all channels in case during production they have gone up again. This seems to be a common pattern when producing....
nice tips, i usually work with effects on return tracks so this has always worked perfect for me, great to always keep an eye on your levels and learn some gain structure. as for controlling multiple volume sliders....just shift select all the tracks you want then hold control and drag the volume slider, or any slider you want really. in live especially mess around with the ctrl and alt and shift buttons with anything you can find you can do some magical things, have fun