Mixing in Ableton Live: A Creative Approach

1. Trailer: Hi, My name is Kemal, and today I'm going to show you how to make your mixes south. Bigger, wider, deeper, tighter and clear. Using only able to stop plug. It's now you notice. I called my class creative mixing. This is a bit unusual as mixing is referred as a science. It's very rational, scientific. You can imagine a surgeon school thing. Sounds of complex machinery. Well, I believe otherwise. Mixer is also an artist. They contribute to a song by bringing their influence like art. Some decisions might not have any justification. It's a matter of personal taste. It's a gut feeling. Therefore, I will teach this class in a creative way more than explaining to you how audio effects works. Want to use them when not to use them? I'll go beyond that and show you how to combine them to create your own effect. Rex. I will show you waste experiment, Force happy accidents. At the end, you will find your identity as a mixer. A few words about myself. My name is Carl office set up. I'm a music producer, composer, sound designer and mixer. I've worked with Grammy nominated engineer Brad Hagel, composed soundtracks for award winning short films. I've done sound designed on trailers like and Settle, Dress Pixels and Point Break. Also mixed songs for radio. And if you wonder, I got into music by producing as diverse, Um, experience may seem, I chose to teach mixing because it is the common link between everything I've done. As you can imagine, mixing orchestra the theater is very different than mixing up step for a nightclub or apple your butts I saw as prerequisites for this class. I would recommend being familiar with the basics of able to know has your import export audio. You'll have your name and color tracks. Also, we're going to talk about audio effect racks. These concepts are applicable in any other day. W However, these futures are specifically designed for able to. Also, you should be familiar with the following terms. Spectrum frequency, fundamental harmonic, transient motto, stereo and delay 2. Project: for this project, I'll give all my students the same stents. It will be up to you to experiment with the stems, using the techniques I will teach you. Now. I'm not expecting a perfect mix because there's no such thing I want to make that represents you. I hope that by the end of this class, gallery will be full of mixes. That sound difference. Although this will be the same song, you'll be able to see the different approaches from your classmates. In a way, it is this collection of work that will prove the point of this class. Mixing is a matter of individual taste. It's up to you to find your own individual sounds. 3. Importing Stems in Ableton: for this first video, I'm going to show you had to import steps into a Bolton. It's kind of a tricky process, but once you know the shortcut, you could save so much time. First of all, let's download this folder from the skill share Web page, and you will find some stems. So, like the ball, drag them into a Bolton. And here's the trick before you let them go old commands. This will align them vertically. Now the next step is to make sure they are worked to do that. Hit command a then shift tab. You will see this. It'll warp icon here, make sure it is unchecked. This will save some issues with tempo. Next. What you want to do is change the tempo of the session I give you to a temple. In this first filed called Reference, the tempo is 1 10 That's type it. It also. What we want to do is make sure that the volume is low on every track. To do that, click on the track name, then command A to select all tracks, then move the volume fader and type in negative 10. The next step is to mute the reference This is only there to show you how to stand sound like altogether after we could rename the audio tracks because names like 45 audio are not very familiar naming them something like kick will make it much easier for afterwards Snare , stare, and so on. Also, if you're a fancy person like me, you could use colors like yellow for drums, purple for base And I think green for guitars. Anyway, once you've done that, you should end up with a file that looks like this. Cool. Now, another thing that I did here is that I folded all my tracks. I have a clear view of decision to do that. All we need to do is hold option and click all these little arrows. Just one of them will open all of them. It works the other way around, too. So that's it for this first lesson. Now that you know how to organize stems, we can go ahead and talk about volume in the next lesson. 4. Volume: Okay, welcome back to this second lesson. I hope that by now you set up your template. You have the steps loaded into a bilton so we could talk about volume. So what is Volume volume is also called gain level or amplitude. It's measured in decibels, DB for short. You can see volume and able to by looking at the green meters at the end of your tracks like this. You can also see thes leaders between audio effects that this will be very helpful in the future. Now the general rule red volume is to never go over zero decibels on the master. Why is that? Well, let's find out by breaking this rule, where you going to do is lower the volume of this video or of your speakers, and we're going to push the volume of all the tracks together and see what happens. Sounds good. What you are hearing is called distortion. It's a misrepresentation of the sound. It's very harsh, aggressive and tiring to listen to. Now I want you to be familiar with this sound. You should be able to recognize it without looking at your screen like that in the future when you hear this distortion, you know? Oh, this is a problem with volume. I should lower some of my tracks. Ironically, even some professional tracks have this sound effect. Hotline bling, for instance, sounds very distorted on the drums. I think they did that purposely, because I'm sure Drake has excellent mixing engineers. My point is, learn how to identify that distortion. Next, let's talk a bit about the relationship between volume and individual tracks. Now you'll notice that everything sounds a bit better if you make it louder. So why don't you experiment with that concept and pushed the volumes of the tracks you like ? Soon enough, you'll notice that your master will go over zero DB because you'll just keep pushing, pushing volumes on every track. You will start hearing distortion, and we will be back to square one. Your brain has fooled you. Making things louder does not make things better. So the real question is, how do you mix with volume? The solution is in one word. Balance would is simple to like volume. You should be able to make each track audible in your mix. A good way to stop is to mix by groups For example, let's stop with the Drum Group. We're going to select symbols, snares and kick drums, and then press command Z to group them gonna name this group drum and cats that I know it's a group. I'm going to color it yellow, and we're going to open these tracks and try to balance them. Now balancing tracks is a bit tricky, because what referential do you use? It's a matter of taste. So in this case, if you don't know where to start, you should listen to songs that you like or songs that sounded like this one and reference it right now I'm just gonna have a listing of the drugs by themselves. Okay, for me to kick drum, it's a bit loud, and the symbols are a bit loud, too. It's been a reduced volume of symbols. A bit of the kick drum. Let's listen to that again. Okay, Now notice that I didn't boost a lot of volume. Always tried to think what is too loud instead of what is not loud enough, Remember, in mixing less is more Okay, so now that you have mixed one group, you could mix other groups. That student base would. For example, I'm going to group sub bass and bass name it base, not color Purple, because I like purple and let's see what we have. OK, so that seems balanced enough for me now. Once you have that, you could now makes two groups together. So I'm going to do drum and bass with base. And here you go. This is in a nutshell. How we makes huge sessions in the industry. Next, let's talk about volume. Automation sometimes attract needs to be balanced differently. According to Assault Section, for example, you might want to have more based on the chorus and not on diverse here. I'm thinking about boosting the volume of the kick drum, but only at the beginning of the section this will mark a powerful entrance. There's many ways to do that, but here I like to use the utility tool. Utility is basically a volume tool that doesn't affect the value at the end of the audio track. Its independence. Now to use automation as just wiggle this little love, and you'll see that line here that started when it started. It means that no automation are activated when I create dots deadline becomes solid and 1/2 created an automation not gonna boost this. Let's see. 89 I don't have a lot of precision, so I like to look things up and use command to make it a bit softer. Okay, let's see how that sounds like. I want to talk about micro automation. These are volume automation is over a short period of time. Very useful to design sounds. Individually, however, I like to use it to create space in my mix, for example, but I'm going to do is duck the volume of the base each time by kick drum hits. This is achievable with sites in compression, but right now I want to remind people that you could do that. Would volume automation Let's take utility and let's create an automation. Now notice that I've marked the position of each kick drum would markers. This will allow me to see exactly when I have to duck the volume. This is how it sounds like. You can see how the bases swelling instead of being very aggressive. Now this is a bit weird, but if you play that way to keep drove at the same time, you could see how it creates space for the kick drum. Lastly, let's hear that in the complete mix. Cool. Okay, so this is the end of our first lesson on volume. Remember to identify distortion with your ears. Remember about using groups to balance your mix. Think also about using automation to create more movement in your tracks. Keep the audience excited. See you in the next lesson. 5. Panning and Widening: I went to use panning in my mind. I have three different reasons why I would want to use panning. The first reason is for realism. Sometimes when you mix of orchestra or band, you want to stay true to that set up. For instance, for orchestra, I would have my violence on the left and the cello and debase onto right now. This does not make any sense mixing ways because thes elements are not conflicting. However, this is how they play in the orchestra. So if I want to stay true to that positioning, I will pan my instruments accordingly. Now the other reason you want a pan is when you have that saying conflicting elements that could be, let's, say, an acoustic guitar and piano. If you feel like they don't blend together, you can put one on the left, one on the right. You can also use panning to create war interesting patterns. For example, if you have running notes or records pattern in your song, you could make this interesting by using panic automation. Now we could do this like we did with volume and created our own automation, but luckily we have a tool for that called Auto pen. Now, before we use it, let's find a track to put it on. What about this are over here. Let's make it more interesting by adding Oto Pan. First, let's set this little note so that it sinks under grid to, let's say would be, then we are going to choose them out. So I'm going to go 100% just for the sake of illustration and then we're in. Choose to shape. We're going to stay with something smooth with a sine wave. Let's see how that sounds in the that is a bit fast. Let's try slower. If you have headphones, you will hear that clearly cool. So that's one way to do it now. The other reason I like to use panning is a more advanced technique called the Haas Effect . The concept is actually really interesting. If I ask you to listen to one single or sound, this sound will be heard in the center because both speakers limit the same signal with same volume and at the same time now, what do you think happens if we alter one speaker would pitch or delay? Let's find out. For instance, we're going to duplicate this part. Put one on the left, put one under, right, And we're gonna listen to both of them. So if they're identical, it should be in the center. Okay, Now watch what happens if I modify one tit CeBIT fight? Did shooting it. Can you hear how now this sound is coming out from one speaker and from the other? But your brain here is it split between left and right? It's not in the center. The sound is wide. In my experience, I find this technique very school to make sounds bigger than life. To apply the house effect. There's many ways to do it. I used a D tune, but you could also use delay. So, for instance, back to this first scenario where we have left and right with no difference, sound is in the middle. Now what happens if we add delay to the track? Let's add 10 milliseconds of delay. The sound is wide again. This is because this rule delay is enough for your brain to interpret the sounds as two different sources. However, if you push the effect too much, you kind of lose the melody of the song. so I would recommend finding a value between 10 and 30 milliseconds for this class. Also mentioned, I wanted you to create your own effect racks. So right now I'm going to show you how to make this effect out of one little box. To do that, we're going to take a simple delay. Then we are going to click on Sing here and here so that we have the time Boat. On one hand, you're gonna have one. M s on the second hand will have, let's say 21. Now turn to dry red to 100%. And here's your first sterile whitener. Now, if you listen to it on a track by itself, So let's start it off. That's what we had before. Turn this effect on its now wide. So I want you to save this tool for later. So to do that, that's hit command you to group it. We'll see some little knobs here, then commend our to rename it. I'm going to call this Carell Widener. Now, the other interesting thing you could do is you can assign Mac Rose, for example, if I want to control to dry wet settings. I could map it to a knob like this. So let's see how it works now, Now that stand one, a map. The delay. I could do it here. If I push this knob, it goes a bit too far through 300. So let's adjust this value by clicking here, going on the top left instead of 300 we're gonna type 30. So now you have a very precise tool to spread your sound. The last step is to save it so that you could use it. Afterwards, I would hit this little button here. It will save into the audio effects and able tens default folder. Let's call it Girl Whitener. And here you go. Next, I want to show you how to analyze the stereo field of a song so that you could hear what's wide and what's not. So to do that, let's try pop culture. You can listen to the white elements of a song by pushing the width on Utility told to 200% . What you're hearing is in fact, a difference between the left and right speaker so you can hear a bit of piano. There's actually a base that's really loud there's some symbols, and there's the reverb of Devo Gal's. Now let's listen to what's in the middle by reducing with 20%. So big difference here. You can hear that the drums and vocals are exclusively in the center of the song, so use this tool to analyze other songs and find out what's in the middle. What's on the left was sunder right and what's wide. Once you know that and you have your own tool, you'll be able to create mixes that south more commercial. That's it for this lesson. So remember that you could use panning for realism. You could also use panning Would auto pad to create interesting motion in the sound. And lastly, you could also use panning to create Wyness in your mix. Thanks for watching 6. EQ: before we start this lesson about Q. I want to show you the difference between sound and noise or what we call a musical sound and noise. For this example, I'm going to use a pure sine wave and noticed that on the spectrum or situation Mableton, we could see one frequency. This is what we call the fundamental. This will give us the pitch of the sound. Now. Some sounds have Harmonix Harmonix are other frequencies higher than the fundamental Here we could see the fundamental and a few harmonics. Now if we opened up situate by clicking this arrow, we have a more precise representation of the sound. You can even put your mouse above these peaks and read the notes with this little box on the left. Now their relation between fundamental and harmonic is very interesting. Let's say, a guitar piano playing the same note. Now the fundamental will be the same, but the harmonics will be different. In fact, it's only thanks to these harmonics that the rain is able to recognize the kind of instrument. Next, let's look at noise Now, if you hear noise and you visualize it in a spectrum First of all. You can't hear any pitch. And second of all that, there's no organization. Harmonic. It's a complete mess. So once you're familiar with these difference, you'll see how unique you can change the timber oven instrument by modifying the relation between the harmonics and a fundamental Okay, so how does a mixer apply que in a mix? In my experience, I use any que in about four different ways. The 1st 1 is by using low pass in high pass filters to clean out frequencies. For example, if I have a sub base like this, I might want to create room in the mix by using a low pass filter. This will get rid of the high frequencies. This room in the high end frequencies will let her be used for, Let's say, symbols or guitars or vocals. You can apply this method in the opposite way. For instance, if we have a lead sound like this one, No, you will notice unwanted noise in debates area. We don't want these frequencies. Get rid of it with a high best filter. If you apply this process on your track, you'll have a much cleaner mix. Next I want to talk about e que in order to change the timber oven instrument, for example, this is how brass sounds like out of the box. Now this is beautifully recorded, and I could use that in a song if it's on its own, but in a crowded arrangement. Sometimes you have to change the timber to make it cut through the mix. To do that, I used a lot of each ewing. Three accuse. Let's see how it sounds like before after so you might not like my new version. But if you listen to it in the mix, it's a whole different story. Can you see how now the brass sounds very muddy if I don't use my cues? So think about that. Mixing is a puzzle. You have to find ways to fit instruments together. It doesn't matter how it sounds by itself. Lastly, I want to tie this lesson about the chewing with the one word panning and whitening to do so. I'm going to talk about mid side each way now, each away tests of other features that are a bit under the radar. For instance, if you change the mode here from stereo to M s, which means mid side you can actually have an eq you for the center and for the side of your signal. You could switch it by clicking on edit. So how do you know what's in the middle and what's on the sides? Well, I talked about this in my pubis lesson about panic. You can use the utility tool and reduce with or boost it. What's that zero beset? You're listening to the center of the single. What is that? 200% you're listening to decides. Okay, let's leave it on the sides and sculpt Aneke you on the side of the signal. Make sure s is selected. Let's create a high pass filter. You can see how this works. Now let's take off utility to hear the south as a whole, you can hear that the fundamental frequencies in the middle and that the higher harmonics are still on the sides. So mid side que is a handy tool when you're dealing would complex sounds that are already wide. Therefore, I want you to save this stool as an audio effect track group it create a macro of the most important feature. For instance, it would be that high pass filter here frequency. Now, in general, I would recommend high passing between 101 160 hertz. It really depends on the song. So let's map this. You've been further by typing 90 but 60. And let's name this that side e que great Now another cool future about this is that you could boost some signals on the edge and lower that by reducing wits in motto here, that's it for this lesson about peak you. So let me recap what we've discovered. You can use eq you to clean up a sound would low pass and high pass filters. Then I showed you how to alter the timber of a sound in order to make it sit in the mix. And lastly, we talked about mid side, each doing in order to control pre existing wide elements 7. Reverb: reverb or reverberation is defined as the persistence of sound after a sound is produced. If I clap my hands remaining sound after this physical clap is called reverb. So why do we hear river? First of all, let's differ in shape. The source sound from the reverb sound. Imagine yourself listening to acquire in a church, the choir sings, and a voice they admit goes directly to your years using a straight line. This is the source sound, however. When the choir sings, divorce is projected in all directions. The sound bounces off the walls till it dies or reaches your ears. This is the river herbs out now. You here to reverb Sound later because the sounds travel mawr distance when they balance everywhere. It's not a direct line. In a way, you can think of reverb as a Neco, but there's so much different types of echoes going on that it all accumulates into cloud of sound that we call river. So if we go back to our acquire, the quality of the reverb will depend on the following elements. The distance from you should acquire the distance retreat, you end a wall, and the material used to build the wall because, as you can imagine, a room made out of pillows is less bouncy for the sound than a room made out of stone. So now that you know the three competence to River, let's find out how we can design rooms in Haledon. Okay, so let's experimentally reverb command f typing reverb all at the top. Side it down here. Now make sure to deactivate everything that's above. I will cover that in another lesson. For a moment, I want you to focus on the dry, wet Nam, the decay time knob size stop to stereo knob and the pre delay Not I would explain you what they do by showing you the effects they do on the track. So here we have this art. Now I'm going toe slowly. Add some witness to the signal and listen to how it affects the sound. So what we are affecting is the first competent. I was talking about the distance between you and acquire or, for example, here, you and the AARP. Now you can after this by modifying the dry, wet button when it's dry imagined, acquire being in your face. All the signal goes to your years when it's wet. The only thing you're here is the reflection on the walls. You're not hearing the choir directly. This adds distance. So the more you turned in up, the more distant element seems to be. Now we have other perimeters, like the decay time decay. Time is actually the time it takes for the reverb as a whole to be quiet. So if it's very long, here, will take nine seconds to be quiet. If we go shorter, you have a shorter decay time. So why do we use that for? Well, let's say having Mr Man, that's really fast. If it's too long, it just creates a cloud of sound and it's muddy. So if you have fast notes and you want to hear them clearly, make sure decay time is short. Next, let's talk about the pre delight. Pre delay is defined as the time before the first reflection hits your ears. For example, if you have a very long pre delay, you'll hear the source sound, then weight 1 68 milliseconds before hearing the reverb south. There's a little delay Now. I would recommend setting a value between one and 30 milliseconds tuff something natural. Next, let's talk about the size of the reverb. So a lot of people criticize able to river because it sounds very metallic. In fact, the only sounds metallic. If you put the size really small, it sounds kind of like a bathroom, so you don't want that. Always try to put this size about 100 make sure the quality is set too high now. The other futures I did not talk about are their low cut filters. This is basically unique you before the signal gets in so you could choose to cut the lower frequencies or the high frequencies. I would recommend cutting the low frequency as they said it. The hike up. You shouldn't worry too much about it. Then the spindle is basically pitch modulation. Think about it as a river barato, so if you push it to the maximum on the top right, you could hear how it's dissident. However, if you put it in the middle, it gets very interesting. Now I want to go more in depth about reverb, but on different types of sound. For example, if I use this tale here, this is ideal to have a very long decay time, so it's experiment with that. Get this very cinematic sound. Next, let's look at the diffusion network to make it simple. This allows you to control the DK for each frequency. Think about it as an e que after the reverb. And finally, let's look at the chorus effect, which is basically just layering different rivers with different de tune settings. And finally, it's talk about stereo. Stereo is simply how wide you want reverb to sound. If you're not familiar with whiteness, go back to my lesson on panning for the last part of this lesson. I want you to create your own unique effect track with the reverb using macros. What I'm going to do here is mapped the most interesting knobs to one macro so that when I move that macro, it's moving all the other knobs at the same time, going to take the K time. I not watch this. I'm going to map this on the same knob. And just because I'm crazy, I'm gonna add one last one, and that will be stereo. Now you can see their settings above on the top left. So for the decay time, I would recommend one second to 10 seconds. So to do that, I'll type 1000 for 1000 milliseconds and so 10. That would be 10,000 for the stereo image. We could go for monitors to full stereo, so this is fine for the dry, wet. We can do the same, and we're done. Now. Let's automate that. Enable tens timeline. So for this Dale, what I want to do is automate this knob so that the river gets bigger at the end of the sounds like this. That's right. An automation to build that river. As you can see by modifying one, knocked, three other knobs are turning by themselves. Cools of this wraps up our lesson on reverb, so remember, there's different perimeters for the reverb. You can control the source signal and a reverberation independently. Try different sizes of room. Try different decay times. Don't forget to save your effect rack and, of course, spend time experimenting, sculpting her own reverb for each instrument in the mix. 8. Compression: in this lesson, I'm going to talk about one of the most difficult concept to grasp and mixing audio compression. I like to imagine a compressor like a superhuman mixing engineer that lowers the volume each time the signal gets too loud. For example, if I talk quietly, the compressor would not do anything. But if I scream, the compressor would immediately reduce the volume. This results in volume consistency developing difference between the cry it park and allowed part is now reduced. We have lowered what we call the dynamic range of the signal. So how do you set up a compressor to do that? Let's imagine a signal coming into the compressor to scenario is gonna happen. Either The input signal is below the treasure old value. So the compressor doesn't do anything or second option. The signal goes above the treasure old and the compressor starts working. When working, the compressor will lowered about two volume above that threshold using a ratio. For example, if you said a ratio three toe one, this means that for every three db above the tresh hold, the compressor will only output one db above that threshold. Let's see how compressor really works in able to command f compressor sledded on your track . While first of all we can see ratio Tresh, Aled and some other fancy budgets that I'm going to cover later to start off, Let's make sure we deactivate makeup gain. This is actually volume compensation for the gain reduction you're going to apply. I don't like to leave it on because this will make the compression effect sound louder and fool your ear, thinking it's better next. The treasure Old value can be set here have a trestle value of negative 30. My compressor will stop working above negative 30. Here I can control the ratio so any signal of negative 30 will be reduced by, Let's say, 6 to 1 and then we have attack and release to understand all these knobs. Let's look at the compressor in action here I have a cool drum loops and the first thing you notice is this orange bar under G. R. G. R stands for gain reduction. This is the volume the compression is lowering. Now, if you understood the concept, you know that if the treasure old is above the in coming signal, there would be no game reduction. Let's see if that's the case. So it is the case. Now. Let's see what the ratio does. Let's make sure the compressor is active by lowering the trestles Now observed the game reduction. What you notice is that the bigger the ratio, the bigger the reduction. If we have a ratio of 1 to 1, nothing happens. The input is equal to the output. It's basically dividing something by one. You get the same thing. Let's look at the different representation of the compressor. If you click on this little L here, what you see is the transfer curve. At the bottom you have the X axis, which represents the input volume. And here is the Y axis, which is the output volume. Delighting orange is the function of the compression. And what you see in yellow is due tresh Aled. So if you haven't ratio, want to one where nothing happens, you can actually see that the input is equal to the output. It's a perfect diagonal. Now, if you push the ratio, you can see how the slope is affected. And if you change the treasure old, you can see at what point the compression is starting to be applied. Next. Let's talk about attack and release. Remember when I was comparing a compressor to a superhuman mixing engineer that was able to react so fast to any problems by lowering the fader well, basically would attack and release. What you are doing is controlling the attitude and the reactions of that superhuman mixing engineer. For example, if you push the attack to, let's say one second, this means that the reaction time of that mixing engineer is one second. So if there's an explosion, it will take him one second to lower that explosion down. So if you use that on drugs, nothing happens because the transit of the drum are so fast and so small that he's not fast enough to catch them. However, if the attack is very small, he's able to catch these transit the right way to see that is a unique future and able to with this little view on the background, you'll see a silhouette, which is the incoming signal in orange is the trestles, and on top of this delight, orange is actually the volume automation that this super mixing engineer is doing. See how, as the attack goes up my little mixing engineers very lazy. Now he could also be lazy, pushing the favors back up to their initial state. This is what we call release with a big release. My lazy mixing engineer takes about 1.12 seconds to go back to the initial state of the compressor. So with that in mind, why do we need all these parameters while four drums? Here's how I think about it. What you want to do is tame the transience of the drums. To do that, you would take a fast attack and short release, a ratio that's, let's say, 4 to 1 and try to absorb thes drum hits that's compared before and after compression so before after what it also does is that it brings up the tail of the sound so that the tale of your snare is much bigger. Now. The other cool feature is playing with the attack. Sometimes you don't want to lose that first hit on the drum, so this push to attack a bit more. This technique will make your drugs punchy in a way to transit will hit hard, and you will still have the effect of compression on the tail of the sound. Now the other thing I want you to remember is that compression is simply automation of volume. Remember, it's a superhuman mixing engineer. Drink that. But you could also do it yourself. In fact, sometimes you don't always need to have a compressor to make the loud parts softer. For example, if you have a vocal and singers shouting at one point and then he's whispering, you can use volume automation to fix that. Sometimes if you use compression instead of doing volume automation, you will create some audio artifacts, some distortions that can get for retiring when you listen to a song in the long run, use compression sparingly. Play with very subtle amounts. I would recommend a ratio no more than five on attack between one and 20 milliseconds for the release. Remember what I said tried to make sure the compressor goes back to zero before it hits the next transient. And as for of its application, I would recommend using compression on anything that goes from allowed to quiet like drums or vocals. That's it for this lesson on compression 9. Advanced Ableton Racks: Throughout this glass, we have created a few racks, like the Zero Whitener, the mid Side Q and the crazy reverb This lesson. I want to show you creative ways to play with these racks. First, let's recap. How do you create Rex? You can either drag on empty rack like this and put it affects in it. Or you can take in effect, group it by doing command G, and it will create an audio effect. Crack around it. Next. Let's talk about Jane Processing Enable toe There's no limit regarding defects You could put in a chain. You can put a river and nick you another river compression and even more effects. After that, if you deactivate this wreck, you will deactivate all the effects inside it. If you have a very long chain and you find yourself using only a few, not remember to macro these important knots. To do that, click on this little button here. Then on map, choose the knobs you like, like the dry, wet reverb. Map it and do that all the parameters you like. Remember that you can also adjust these knobs precisely controlling the minimum and maximum value, and you should be set. Here's an example where I used a long chain to process. Is there Uh huh. Here's this there by itself. Here's this. There were that processing very different sound. Now, what is great about this wreck is that I have no idea what I did. But since I saved, it allows me to go and grab it whenever I need it. Or I feel like I need that type of processing. It's a great way to experiments force accidents and find your signature sound as a mixer. Moreover, able to gets crazier when you start using parallel processing. That means that instead of having effects going into each other and chains, they can work in layers. Here is a great example. With this baseline, here's how it sounds altogether in the mix without What I did here is that I simply created chains in parallel with different effects. For example, just right, click, create chain and add effects. You walk now what I did in particular this one. I had the original signal with a bit of distortion, but what is interesting is I added more content on the left and right by distorting the high frequencies in very small amounts and different quantities. In fact, by using overdrive, I created harmonics to make my base cut through the mix, but also by processing left and right signal individually I created with which makes my bass sound bigger. The last thing I want to talk about is creating shortcuts to easily a B your effects. This will enable you to compare in real time you're processing. Sometimes it's hard to objectively judge in effect you spent hours on. That's why I always like to switch effects on enough on multiple tracks at once to do that hit command cake, then click on the on off effect here and decided to a letter, for example, I will assign it to Q. You can also do that on other elements somebody that on my stair processing here. And I'm also good on my kid processing right here hit command kid again to go back in my regular mode Now. Each time I will hit that Q button, I will actually deactivate all my chains. So here's how my mixed sounds without my processing. And now, after processing very nice way to reference your work to the original source material That's it for this lesson on racks. Now, as an assignment, I want you to create your own effect rack taker, screen shop and uploaded to skill share at some words, explaining what you would use that rack on. Remember, be creative. Put tons of effects together. We never know what is going to happen. Experimentation is key. Thanks for watching. 10. Closing: Now that you're familiar with the basic techniques of able to know that you have created your own able to Iraq's, you are equipped to kill this Knicks. Now, before you go ahead and mix it, I want you to have these little tips in mind. Mixing is a very tiring process. Take frequent breaks. Also, listen to your songs at a moderate volume. This is the level that immune. Your friends are going to listen to that song. Save your project as multiple times. You'd be surprised how the further you go sometimes mixes can sound worse. Just go back in this into previous work. That's it. Can't wait to hear what you guys are gonna come up with. Thanks for watching.