Ultimate Ableton Live 12, Part 6: Mixing, Mastering, & DJing

1. Introduction: Everyone and welcome to the Ableton 12 Part six. In this class, we're going to focus on mixing, mastering, and DJing. We're going to start. We're going to talk about controllers. Everything we need to know about controllers, how to hook up a whole bunch of controllers that I have laying around here and use them with live, both for production and for live performance. Then we'll talk a whole bunch about this push controller, how it works, if you need to buy one, if you should buy one. What are the pros and cons of having one? We'll go into some other performance setup things like follow actions, some performance racks, how to convert a arrangement view session to a session view session so that it's teed up for you to do a DJ set with it. Then in the second half of this class, we're going to go into mixing and then mastering. So in that process, I've got a track that we're going to mix. Then we're going to master it. I'll show you how I do everything in live and how you can tee. So stick around for that. It's going to be really fun. We're going to do a whole bunch of really useful tricks in this class. So let's dive. Here's a. Here's B, right? So you could do some cool things with that. And this is going to help. Now, we don't want to just flatten out all of our dynamics, right? That's going to make a very boring mix. But we do want to taper it down a little bit and kind of control it. So here at the top. This is where I get my clip grid Here I can see individual samples. And at this point, you know, I'm basically looking here a song on the radio. Let's say you're driving down the road and you're listening to the radio and you hear a song. Then you hear another song after that, y? If the next song is just quieter. Like you didn't do anything to your stereo, it just is quieter than the previous song. So you reach for 2. What we are Covering Here: Okay, so here we are. Part six. If you followed along all the way from Part one, you're probably getting a little sycamy and I'm sorry, but we have two big parts left. I'll try to be as entertaining as I can. As always, I'm always trying to be entertaining. Anyway, back to business. So, here's what we're going to cover in this class. It's kind of a whole smattering of stuff. The first chunk of stuff is all going to be kind of around DJ, but there's a couple tools we need to learn in order to kind of really take advantage of some of the DJ and performance abilities of live. So we're going to start by talking about controllers. We've talked about controllers a bit way back, I think in the first class. Okay. We're going to get a little bit more into that specifically with performance controllers. Not so much with keyboards and middy guitars and stuff like we talked about earlier on. Although, I am going to show you how to use an instrument as a controller. More on that mite. We'll talk about the push, push controller, the push three. That's this thing that you can't see. I'll pull it out. We'll talk about follow actions, performance setup. And then we'll get into mixing. So kind of a whole different shift paradigm shift. But we'll get into mixing. I'll walk you through how I mix some mixed techniques that I've picked up over the years. And then finally mastering. So those are our big things for this class. After this, really, there's nothing left, really, but Max for Live. I think we've covered just about everything in this whole program over the last 30 some hours of class content that you've watched, which is awesome. Let's dive in to controllers. 3. The World of Controllers: Okay, so let's define controllers a little bit. We're not talking about instruments here. Although controllers are often hidden as instruments, and it's not terribly uncommon for us to have both, something that is both a controller and an instrument. The easy way to think about the two is that instruments play notes, controllers, trigger things, move stuff. Typically not notes. There are ways to turn an instrument into a controller, and I'll show you that in a few minutes. But for now, let's just talk about controllers. So let's go to my controller graveyard, shall we? Let's take a walk. Okay. So this drum pad is kind is mostly just an instrument, not really a controller. Another computer, however, can be a controller, if you want to set it up that way. Here, I have a bunch of microphones, but underneath it. This is an APC 40. This is the G two DJ controller for many years. I'll pull that one out in a minute. This controller I loved, no notes on this, dials, triggers, and faders. This was a great live controller for a bunch of years. I really liked it. This ovation keyboard is a keyboard, but it has some controller stuff on it so it can be used as a controller. This here's the push two, I think. Not my current push. Not the push three, but the push two. That's an audio interface. An iPad can be a controller. There are a bunch of apps that will let you use an iPad as a controller. This is my old foot controller. This was my go to foot controller for many, many years. This thing was great. I don't often get behind Baringer stuff, the company Baringer, but this one super reliable for me. So it's got two continuous controllers, and then a bunch of buttons that you can see I've labeled for my specific setup. And then we have the new push the controller, new now, I suppose. There's a lot of controllers in here. So when we're using controllers, we're talking about launching clips, controlling the volume, controlling the panning, controlling effects, a lot of stuff that we can do live. Now, you can use controllers for more than just performing and DJing and stuff. They're great just to have on your desktop to get your hands on the mix. There's a lot we can do with them. First, let's talk about connecting controllers and mapping controllers, and then we'll go into some things we can do with them. Okay. 4. Connecting Controllers: All right, let's connect some controllers. So I pulled out this one. This Novation launch Kito remote zero S L. I haven't used this thing in a long time, and I've never used it with this version of live. So we're going to connect it for the first time together. So in order to do this, Well, first, let me talk about what kind of connection you should use. You can see hopefully in the back of this that it has old school midi ports, and it also has a USB port and a power port. Now, the way most devices work is if they have both My ports and a USB port, use the USB port. Save yourself a ton of work. Use the USB port. If it doesn't have a USB port, and it just has MIDI ports, meaning that it's an old device, you're going to need to get a MIDI interface of some sort. If you're using USB, you probably don't need to use power. The power input is probably just for if we're using MI stuff, right? So USB has power built into it, a little bit of power. Sometimes you need both power and USB. But in this case, I think I just need USB and I'll be fine. I'm going to plug in USB and not those M ports. Before I do that, I'm going to go to Live and I'm going to go to my settings, and I'm going to go to Link tempo and Midi. Okay? So Here we have we've seen this before. We have all our instruments down here. See my keyboard, a USB met interface. This fish Man is my MD guitar, push three. Up here, we have control surface. Now, control surface, basically a fancy name for controller. That's the kind of controller that we're talking about here. So you see my push two was set up as a control surface. This launch key mini, which is a little keyboard I have over there. That was set up as a control surface, but neither of them are plugged in right now. You can see they're all grayed out. So let's plug this one in. All right. So now it's plugged in with USB, and let's turn it on to the USB setting, and it's lighting up. And there it is. It's popped right up. Remote SL classic. That is what this thing is. So we have inputs and outputs. Now, We need inputs. So this input means that this thing is going to send numbers and values to live, and Live is going to accept them input. So make sure that it's set up to listen to your inputs. Outputs you may or may not need. That's live sending stuff back to this. Now, this has a display on it and it can say some stuff. So that's what Live is sending back out to it is just updating and telling us what it's doing. It also can give us the tempo which you see in this little light blinking. Hopefully, you can see that. A little light. Yeah. So it can get the tempo. So we can get stuff back. Your device may not need to get stuff back. So that's really all it has to do. Let's talk really quick about this takeover mode while we're here. Takeover mode means this. Let's say I have this fader. Mm. Let's say I have where did it go? This fader mapped to the volume of channel one. So on the screen, I click the volume and I move it all the way to the top. But this fader is sitting at the bottom. So what happens when I grab this fader and move it, right? Because the software thinks it's up here and this is down here, and when I move this to take it over, so to speak, what happens? That's what this takeover mode does. So if we say no, it's just going to jerk right up to where it is. It's going to make a pretty rough sound. Pick up means this fader is going to do nothing until I hit where it is in the track in the software, and then it's going to latch onto it, and then I'm going to control it. I'm going to have to go up and pick it up, so to speak, and then I've got it and I can move it around. Okay. And then value scaling means that it's basically going to do some fancy math and go kind of up a bit very slowly until I latch onto it, and then it'll be perfectly. So it's going to kind of mimic the shape and do some fancy stuff and then come back and grab it. That's usually where I like it is value scaling, that is handy for me. But that's it. That's all it takes to set this up. Then we're good to go. 5. What Can I do with Controllers?: Okay, so what can you do? What can you do with controllers once you have them set up, and why do we care? Let's say that I'm working on this track. That's on the screen. I can use this controller to help with my mix, or maybe I get it to a state where I'm ready to perform it. Let's look at both of those situations. So let me pull up my mixer here. This controller uses something called auto mapping, and a lot of controllers do this. What that means is that as soon as I plug it in, live knows this brand of controller. It knows what it is, and it recognized it when it saw it. We could tell because it knew what the name of it was. So because of that, I can auto map to it, meaning that a bunch of things are automatically going to be connected to it. So what we have here is. So we have, all of these faders, right? So I'm just going to move this one and see what's happening on the screen. It already knows to use these for my open session, right? So this is fun when you're mixing because what it means is you can really just kind of get your hands on the mix. Feels a little more real that way sometimes. Like this. Oh. That can be really fun. Now, if you get to performing and maybe you're doing a session view thing, we can use some of the pads on these devices to launch clips. We can also still continue to mix from arrangement view from session view so that if we're performing something, we can control the mix. I can maybe control some of the panning and sens. So we're using something called auto mapping here. But I can overwrite the auto mapping and I can make my own mapping. So like I have a dial here and maybe I want this dial to control the panning of my first track. I can set it up to do that really easily. Let's do that now. Okay. 6. MIDI Mapping: Okay. This thing is called MIDI mapping. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to go up to this Mi button all the way up here. You can also just press Command M whenever you want. But they're going to turn your screen into this mess of purple or whatever your live looks like. Anything that's purple, I can map to a MIDI device. So a controller of some kind, even an instrument, which I'll show you in a minute. So let's say I want this panning knob to be on one of my dials on my remote zero S L. All I have to do. This is super easy. All I have to do is click that once. I'm going to click the thing I want to map to. It's clicked. Now, on my device, I'm going to Move this knob. I'm just going to wiggle it. Okay? That's it. It's done. You can see this thing popped up up here. This is a list of all of our mappings. And it's not going to work right now. It's not going to look like it worked because I got to get out of Mi mapping mode. So I can click this button again or press Command M. Now I'm out of it. But now, whenever I move this dial, I suddenly have control of my panning in that now. I still have control of my volume over here in my faders, even on this one. But now panning is on this dial. I can do this all day long. What if I This controller has some pads right here. What if I wanted this pad to mute this track. Really easy. All I got to do is go back into Mi mapping, Command M, hit this track activator and now hit this button. Okay. All right. And it showed up here, and so we're done. Let's get out of midi mapping. Now when I hit that button. Okay. Okay. We mute or unmute. Okay? So I can do this all day long. I can map anything to any parameter as long as it's one of those things that shows up in purple, which is almost everything, really. I mean, there's tons of stuff you can do here. So like launching clips, right? Like, if I wanted to launch a clip, I would just click on the box, hit a pad and then get out of this. And then whenever I hit that pad, we're going to launch that clip. Right? Super cool. So MIDI mapping is a really important thing you can do. Now, there's another version of it called key mapping that I don't think we've talked about yet. So it's not entirely relevant to controllers, but I do want you to know about key mapping. So let's go onto a new video and talk about that. 7. Key Mapping: Okay, you may have noticed we have MD up here, but we also have this word key just hanging out up there. Let's click on that. Now we have a whole bunch of stuff that turned orange. The difference between MIDI mapping and key mapping is that key mapping wants you to map to this thing, your quart keyboard. Anything on this you can map to to anything that's orange on the screen right now. Let's say I want to launch this clip by pressing F. I just click on it once, and then I click on the letter F. Maybe I want to launch this one with G and this one with H. Let's get out of midi mapping mode, and now I have those three things under F G and H. Cool. What if I want to Well, command K is going to take us back into mid mapping mode. So things with volume fades are tough. What if I can map that to my arrow key so that I can kind increment up and down. But those are kind h to do with. It lets you do it, but it's not super useful. Try to do things that are just buttons a clip. Launching a scene, muting, soloing, things like that. If I wanted to solo this track by pressing the number four. Cool. I can do that. So now it's so I can toggle solo by pressing the number four on my keyboard. Now, this might be giving you problems. If you're thinking, J, none of this is working, these keys aren't working, and this little thing is blinking at me right now. That's very possible. Here's why. This little thing is our computer midi keyboard. That says that tells Ableton treat this like a piano keyboard, that's cool for entering notes. But if you're trying to map notes or map things to this, that little thing is blinking saying, I'm already being used. That thing is blinking and screaming at you, saying, I can't do both. I can't I can't do both. There's no way around that. You got to turn this off if you want to do key mappings. If I turn this on and then do four, It's still going to work for four, but not these other things. If I do this F mapping that I did, it's saying no, that's a Me and a key. You got to turn that Keympping is super cool. If you have any really repetitive tasks, map it to a key and then just shoot it out. It's great for performance, but it's also great for production. Let's get back to our MD controllers and let me show you how you can use an instrument as a controller. 8. MIDI Keyboards as Controllers: Okay Okay. Using Mmpping. I can map notes to control things if I really want to. Let me go over here. First of all, let me go back to Mi mapping and show you how to unmap some stuff. If I want to unmap these things, I just go back into Mi mapping, I can do two things. One, I can click the line up here, that is the thing I want to map, and then just press Delete. Or I can go to the thing that's mapped like this panning and click it there and then just press Delete and it goes away. I'm going to delete all of these. I'm also going to delete these key ones because they're just going to trip me up later. Okay. All right. So now I'm over in Mi mapping, and I've added three new audio tracks and each have a sample. I have a snare, a kick, and a high hat. So I could go here and map these to the pad on my controller. But I could also map them just to a note and trigger them with a note. So if you're using a piano keyboard, you can map notes to do things to triggers, things that are not just notes. I put these three new clips in and I'm going to map them to just some notes on my keyboard. So I'm just playing mini notes. Let's play a C. Okay a D, and an E. It's a mess to do it that way. But you can map notes if you really want to. It would be easier to map things like the pads in this controller, which are notes. Let me delete these and try that. See, these are coming in as notes also, but they're a little bit easier to deal with. Now, you go to play it with my fingers. If you look around online, people doing, finger drumming stuff, it's amazing. I'm not that, but people can do amazing finger drumming stuff. Anyway, let's move on. Yeah. 9. What is the Push?: Okay. Let's talk about the Ableton push for a minute. Now, this is like a supercontroller. You may have seen these around. This is a controller that is made by Ableton. This is the only controller that they make, at least for now. This is designed to completely incorporate everything Live can do. The theory here is that you don't even need to look at your screen. You can do everything from right within push. So if you're saying like, what is push, push is a controller. It is a controller, it is a control surface. It is also an instrument. These keys are set up to let us play things. That's what they're doing right now. And it gives us full control over everything we're looking at. If I look at something different, We're going to see different things, depending on what I'm focused on. There's some clips, different tracks. So it's a very versatile thing. Now, the push three, which is what we're looking at here, this exists in two different flavors. One, you have to be plugged into a computer that's running live. If you don't want to, you never have to look at live. The idea is that you could pull this out on stage or use this while you're producing and never have to look at live. You can do absolutely everything from within the push the controller. But there's a second version of it that actually has a computer in it, and then you don't need to be connected to live at all. You can just sit on a plane and use your push. It is completely not dependent on a computer. This is the one that needs to be tethered. It needs to be plugged in, it's not a standalone version. If you look on their website, there is a standalone version and I think what we call a tethered version, meaning it needs to be plugged in. Which it is. Now, the push three, this is different than the push one and push two, but the push three is also an audio interface. You can plug in. It's got a couple. Inputs and mic pres, so you can plug into it and use it that way. So it's really versatile. It's really cool. I would say you should get one if money is no object. They are not cheap, though. So we've got play controls, record, capture, automate, quantize. Everything that's on the screen you can get access to here in Push. So let's talk real quick about setting it up and then showing you some of the stuff you can do with Push. 10. Setting Up the Push 3: All right. I'm not intentionally hiding my face right now. It's just that I only have one good camera. I want to focus on the push for this section. If you miss my face, don't worry. I'll come back. Okay. Let's talk about setting up the push three. This is just the same as everything else. It's actually quite even a bit easier. This has a USB cable coming out of it. So we plug that into our computer and then if you are using Live 12, you're pretty much good to go. It should see it automatically. But if we're not sure, we can go here and see it as input and output. Here's my push three and I have most things turned on. I could turn it on for this if I wanted. Outputs. Use report. Sure. Why not? It's not going to hurt anything to turn more things on. Now, if you want to use it as an audio interface, you're going to go here to audio and say audio input from push three right there. I don't want to do that, but you can do it. It's got I think two inputs. And now able to totally see it. So everything I'm doing in live is updating on the push instantly. It's also generating this orange box here. This orange box is showing us what we're seeing on push in terms of the clip slot grid. Now, the push isn't set up as a clip slot grid. It looks like one, and I can go into a mode where it is just showing me the clip slot grid and I can launch stuff. But right now it's actually set up as a keyboard. We'll lay on it. So if I was showing the clip slot grid, this is what I would be seeing. Let me show you. Okay. Now it's showing me the clip slot grid, and it's showing me just these four because I have just those four clips. So I could launch those clips here if I wanted. There's really nothing on them. If I wanted to launch these drums over here, I've got to slide this orange box over. And the way I'm going to do that is with this page button here. That's going to let me kind of scroll over. And now I have those three drum lids. Cool. So I can go page back with this button right here and get back to where we were. If I go up here, if I go up here, I can actually see my clip slot grid up here and what it's doing. Let's go page over, you can see my clip slot grid showing up just like it does on screen. I can scroll around also using this giant wheel up here. Anyway, that's how you set up to push three. Now let's go into a separate video and we'll talk about navigating around down push a little bit. Okay. 11. Navigating Push: Okay, let's do a little bit of navigating around on the push. Just to kind of see how it's oriented to be a lot like the Ableton screen. Now, I don't want to spend too much time on this because not everybody has a push and this isn't a class about the push. I have been asked 100 or 1,000 times to make a class just on the push, and I will probably do that suit. So if you want to know more about the push, I will be making a separate class on it. But for now, just a quick overview of knowing your way around to see what this thing can do. If we go up here at the top, this is where I get my clip slot grid. Here I can see individual samples And at this point, you know, I'm basically looking at a simpler here. I can scroll through the different ones and I can adjust parameters up here. If I want to go to, for example, my Zoom settings, my crop settings, I can do that with this. All right, so I can kind of nudge it forward a little bit if I want. I can go to some warp settings and do all kinds of crazy stuff that are going to create some craziness. You know, I can almost edit this full thing right on the screen. Anyway, I I go here, I'm going to get my mixer. So with this, I can control my mix quite a bit. I can also kind of see what's going on. If we play some music, we'll see it in its full glory here. So we can use this to mix. Page over track. That's pretty cool. I can stop that with this play button down here. Then here I can go into my device settings. So on this particular track, I don't have any devices, but here we have all our macros for these different devices on each of these tracks. So you can see all my tracks listed here, and I can get access to anything I want up here. I can move around with these arrows here where it changes what I'm seeing. If I go back to Session view, I can basically move our big orange box around more delicately this way than just using the page over stuff. But both of them will do it. Let me go back to the My keyboards. You can really kind of see what I'm doing here. Okay. So I hit this button, and we go back to the Mdy keyboards. Let me go to a less crazy instrument here. Okay. Okay. Well, that'll do. So what we have basically here is orange notes in this case, it's going to depend on the color of your track. But orange notes are the root, and all the white notes are other notes in that scale. So this is set up right now to be looking at an individual scale. So we're going to play all the notes in the key. So you can see how notes repeat. Like this note is also here. So, notes repeat all the time. If we go this way, we're going to go up a scale. We go this way. We're going to go up fifths, I think. Um So it lends to some cool patterns. But this is basically a major cord. If we want to just go totally to chromatic mode, we can press the scale button here. And then in key or chromatic, we go to chromatic. Now, what it's showing us, it's still showing us our scale, but it's showing us the notes in between also. So now we're totally chromatic. Right? So that's kind of how it works. It's very different than, like, a keyboard, but I kind of like it. I've gotten used to it pretty fast. I go back to scale. Go back to in key. Yeah, a very different format, but I like it. It's fun. 12. Should you Buy a Push?: Okay. So should you go out and buy a push? Maybe. If you like tech and gadgets and have unlimited money? Yes. You should go out and buy a push. Do you need one to make awesome music? Nope. You super don't. I have one. Sitting here. This is my third one. I've had to push one, push two and push the. And they're awesome. Do I use it on every track I make? No. Do I use it on most track? No. I don't. The thing I use it for to be totally honest with you, more than anything else is I like to reach over without looking and just play some stuff. With that layout of keys, I'm so familiar with the computer with the traditional piano keyboard. That sometimes I feel like I get stuck in a rut and reaching over and using this format is so different that sometimes it helps me come up with a new idea when I'm in a pitch. So I love it for that. But honestly, I don't use it a ton. I know people that do though. I know people that use it for everything. So it's great. It's a really well designed thing and it's awesome. You don't need one, but they're pretty cool. 13. What are Follow Actions?: Okay. Okay. Up next, I want to look at something that is often used in live performance. I've also used it in production in a weird way. It's mostly a performance tool. But it's something if you set it up right, it can actually just write music for you. What I thought we would do in this section is I'm going to explain how to do this, and in the process of doing it, I'm going to make like an ambient music generator, where we hit play and just starts generating random music ambient music. Random M B music. The thing that we're talking about here is follow actions. I'm just going to grab an audio clip and put it here, and then just for the sake of cleanup, I'm going to turn off these mit tracks. You can do this with met tracks and audio tracks. This is a session view thing. I don't think there's really anything in arrangement view that's related to this, this really only works in session view. I'm going to put a clip in here. Now, if I go down here to my clip window, and I go to this launch setting, Here we see follow actions and then a bunch of stuff. This is what we're focused on here. Now, what follow action means is. I can click this button, this little play button to launch this clip. That's easy. We all know about that. But what follow actions do is they say, what would you like me to do when this clip is done playing. What I can do is I can say, Well, after this clip plays, Play it again, or play the previous clip. Play the next clip, play the first clip on this track, play the last clip on this track. Play any clip. Play any clip other than the one you're just on, or jump to some other clip. Basically, I can say, randomly choose another clip and start playing. Now, there's some Now, there's a lot of uses for this. And one of them is to do, what we're going to do here, just to say start something playing and say randomly go to other stuff and keep going forever. But there's also some much more practical things. Like, imagine you have a bunch of high hats, and they are slightly different and you want to kind of have it randomly pick which high hat it uses. So it's going to that fast. It can do that. It can do that just fine. And you'd set that up the same way that we're going to set this up. Okay? So in order to do this, first, we're going to need a bunch of clips. So let's find some just kind of ambient clips first. Don't love that. Don't love that. That's cool. I'm gonna throw that on here. This will be my just, like, ambient track. It's kind of cool. Maybe we'll put that on a different track. Soft Tinnitus. I like that. That's kind of cool. Put that over there. That's cool. A couple more ambos. Cap. Ready to that one. Here's another good one. These atmost ones are really good for this. Let's just put a bunch of those in there. I like that. Okay. So now we've got let's see, one, two, three, four, five. Let's maybe do one more. Sure. Six. Okay. I got six clips there. So let's fill this out. Let's add a little bit more. Let's see if we can add some percussion. That's not too abrasive. Okay. That's kind of cool. Let's put that onto a new track. Now I kind of want some kind of chord. So let's turn that off. Let's go Cord That's kind of cool. Let's make this a harmony part. That's cool. I'm just kind of randomly picking stuff. That's cool. I'm not really. Paying attention to the harmonies and how they're working together. I think it'll be just fine. Okay. I need a couple more percussion things, maybe. Okay. Let's actually just put that there. Sure. We'll put that there. Okay. That's enough. Okay. So now we've got something set up. We've got all these ambient things kind of just roaming around. Let's go to a new video and let's set up the follow actions. Okay. 14. Setting Up Follow Actions: Okay. So here's what I'm going to do. I could go here. Click on this first one, and then I can go here and say, Okay, follow action. So what we have here is these two drop down menus, and then this slider. So here's the easiest way to think about this is we're going to set this slider because this is a percentage is all we're really doing here. I could say I could leave it right there. 72%, 28%. 72% of the time, this is going to happen, and 28% of the time, this is going to happen. Pretty simple. So for this clip, I want to say 100% of the time. Jump to a different clip. Randomly choose a clip is what this one says. Then I can go to this linked or unlinked thing. Now, we've seen this before, envelopes. What this means is, if I say linked, that means that this follow action is going to trigger at the end of one time through this loop. I can change this to say four times or whatever I want. Four times through the loop and then it's going to do this follow action. I go back to one time. But if I say unlinked, then we're just saying, at what point do we want it to trigger and we get a bars beats and milliseconds read out here. So we can tell it at this amount of time, trigger the next thing. So now we have the launch setting, so we can say how we want to launch it. Trigger gate toggle or repeat. Trigger is our usual one. That means we're going to say go and it's going to play all the way till the end. Git means we say go, and then when we stop saying go, it stops playing. Toggle means we're going to say go and it's going to start playing, and if we say go again, it's going to stop playing. I'm not really sure what repeat is. I think it might just mean start over every time we say go. But for what we're doing here, it needs to be trigger or else it's not really going to work right. Okay Legato is kind of a complicated idea, and I want to devote a separate video to that. So hold on to Legato for just a minute. We're going to come back to it. Quantize means when can this launch. Now, this is a tricky concept because Live is set up, as we've talked about a long time ago now, Live is set up so that when you launch a clip, it's going to wait for the next downbeat to launch. So that is defined right here. This is our global quantization amount, and it says 1 bar, meaning it's only going to launch things on the downbeat of a bar. Now, that might be okay. That might work for us well here. But it also might not. So what we could say is the setting here is global, which means use that, but I can change it. I could just say none and just say, launch whenever you're ready. Whenever you get the follow action, launch it. Let's do that I can adjust the velocity of it if I want to, but I'm going to leave it alone for now. Okay. Now you see this play button has a little extra player to it because that's telling us that there's a follow action on it. Let's try it. We've set this up. I'm going to hit play, and then we're going to see what happens when it gets to the end of this clip. It's got already arm another one. So this one's waiting. Come to the end. Cool. And jumps to it. Great. Okay. So at the end of this one, though, it's going to stop because this one doesn't have a follow action. So what we need to do is set up follow actions on all of these, and there's a quick and easy way to do it. Let's go to a new video and let's do that, and let's also put a little envelope fade at the beginning and end of each of these. Okay. 15. Grouping Follow Actions: Okay, so first, just in order to make this to sound a little bit better, and so nothing really jumps to it, I'm going to go to this first clip. I'm going to go to envelopes, track volume, and I'm just going to add a nice, gentle kind of fade in and fade out to this. Okay. So now, Okay. Now, we have a nice little fade in. I'm going to do that for all of these real quick. This one already has one. Not so much a fade out. Let's go to the next one, fade in. This looks pretty good. Fade in Fade out. You don't have to do this fade in, fade out step. I just like it. One more on our ambient stuff. All right. I could do the same thing for the rest of these, but maybe I. That one doesn't need one. This one kind of does. Actually, that's a guitar thing. Maybe that's okay. Let's leave the rest of them for now. Okay. So now, if I want to put a follow action on all of these, here's what I can do. I can select all of these clips. I just clicked on the first one and then shift click on the last one. Now you'll see here, I'm group editing stuff. You can do this with almost anything, but it's a little dangerous, so you got to pay attention to what you're doing. This kind of striped thing here is telling me that you're editing a whole bunch of stuff. It says six clips. I'm editing six clips at once. So I can change the volume, the warp settings of all of these clips all at once. That might be dangerous. Okay. So anything that's all on or all off means it's the same in all of these clips. But if it does this kind of thing, that means that's on on some and not on in others. So be careful. So the follow action is on on some and not on on others. It's on on the first one. So I'm just going to click it and that's going to turn it on for all of them. I'm going to say jump to another one, 100% of the time. Link one time through trigger, quanti, none. Velocity is the same. I don't need to do legado here. We'll get to legado in just a minute. Okay. Now. Let's do the same thing with all the rest of these. I could have done them all at once, but other action 100% of the time. Linked Quanta none I just need to start one clip per track, and it's going to start playing music. So I'm going to launch this first scene and then we're off to the races. Okay, pretty fun, right? All right. Let's talk about this legato mode. And then I'm going to give you the session. So let's talk about legato. Okay. 16. Legato Mode: Okay. Let's look at these two clips. Actually, these three clips, really. Um, When we talk about legato in a musical setting, what we talk about if we're going to play something legato, we've got we might have two notes, right? And if I write that for a violinist, and I say, play that legato, what I'm saying is, let the first note really kind of drift into the second note, just like combine with the second note. And that's kind of what we're doing with legato here. So if I say legato, what that means, is that I'm going to play this clip, and let's say it plays all the way to right here, and then a follow action is triggered. So it switches to another clip. Now, without legado mode, what that means is that next clip is going to be triggered and then it's going to start playing from its beginning. If this Columba clip is triggered next, it's going to start playing from the beginning of it. But if legado mode is on, I'm right here and a new clip is triggered. What that means is, go to the same spot in the next clip and take over. This one's going to play to here, and then we trigger our follow action. And then we're at 1.3, so in this one, we're going to jump right to here, 1.3. This clip is much longer. But But we're still going to jump to the same spot and take over. Now, the reason you might want to do that is if you're doing this follow action thing like with a beat, right? And you want to tell it to switch on every quarter note. Like, This is actually kind of a cool trick. He, let's do it super fast. Come on. Drums. Okay. Let's do this on a new track. Sure. Oh. Sure. Okay. We'll do it on these three. So if I tell these to switch every quarter note, then without legado, then you're going to just hear beat one on these loops, every quarter note. You're gonna hear beat one, and then it's going to trigger a new clip, and you're going to hear beat one again, then it's going to trigger a new clip, and you're going to hear beat one. But if it's on legado mode, you're going to hear beats one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, Just jumping around between different clips. Let me demonstrate. So go here follow action. Let's just go next. So they go in order in action. Okay. Trigger every quarter note, legato. Now, let's do it without legato first. Oops, I need to go unlinked here and say one trigger every one beat. Okay. Now we're just hearing B one. But if we say legato for all of these, then we're going to hear all the beats. See, so that's what legado mode can do. It's going to pick up where the last one left off and keep going. So if you're doing it with beats, it can be a really cool kind of rhythm generator. But let's turn that off. Okay, so now we've got our just beautiful ambient music generator. So if you want to launch this, launch one clip in each thing. You can do it just by launching the scene over here, or you could just kind of randomly pick things to launch in different ways. And now, it's just gonna play. Let's just listen to this ambience beautiful thing for a minute. 17. Converting to Session View: Okay. So what we're going to do here in this section is we're going to try to set up a track for performance. So we're going to get it all configured so that we could perform with it live if we wanted to. Now, typically, we do that with Session view. So our first job is that if we're not already working in Session view, is to get it over to Session view. So, I have a track here that I've been working on. This is a brand new track. It's early in the stages of it. Don't judge me. It sounds a little bit like this. Cool. So first thing we need to do is get it over to Session view. Now, there's a few ways we can do this. Really three that are actually, there's kind of a lot, but three are the most practical. And the third one that I'm going to tell you is probably the easiest. So the first way would be to just bounce out our stems. That means, take this whole track silence and all, exported as one audio file, with this in it also, and then do the same thing with this track Okay. And then this track. And then this track basically makes stems of our track. Okay. Then we could import those to session view, and if we lined them all up actually across and then hit play, it would sound the same, that would give us a little control over them. However, not much. If you wanted to do that, the fastest way to do it would be to go to file export audio and video, and then in this menu where it says rendered track, select all individual tracks. That'll make you one audio file for each audio track. Okay. But that's kind of the long way around, and it's not great. So option two, getting a little bit better, we could select all click and drag, while we're holding onto this, hit the tab key, and we could drop this right into our session view, and it looks like that. Now, this works. This gives us access to all our clips and we could click through and launch them. But if we really wanted this to look like a song and feel like a song, we've got a lot of cleanup to do. We got to get rid of a lot of this extra stuff. We got to organize things and arrange them in a way that's going to be practical to perform them. This works great, but it's not my favorite way. I'm actually going to undo that. Let me go back over it. Our third way is this called capture and Insert scene. This is a newer way, and here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start playing this and every time I get to a new section, I'm going to press Shift command. If you're on a PC, Okay. You can see that right here, whatever your key command is here. Capture an insert scene. Okay. Every time I hit that, it's going to basically make a scene in session view. Now, when it does it, I'm going to have to hit it, and then I'm going to go hit the back to arrangement button because it's going to be thinking we're in session of view for a second, and then I'm going to do it again. Okay? So I'll just kind of talk through it. So let's go to this intro, and I'm going to hit play, and then we'll just do it. Here we go. Let's go all the way a. So this seems like a good spot. Command shift. And now I'm going to hit that back to arrangement. Let's go. Up to here, right? Can the ****. I agree with you. This section. Let's go here. Let's get to this next section, another one. Okay. So I did it five times, four times. I'm going to hit tab and go over to Session view. Okay? Here's what we got. So it grabbed all of the clips that were playing when I hit that. So now I've got a little bit easier to manage. So if I launched this scene, x. There's our keys. So it kind of arranged them upside down, which is interesting. But while I still have some cleanup to do to get this really in a way that is easy for me to see and deal with in a performance setting, I don't have very much, not as much as any other option. So I'm in pretty good shape. Okay. So that's my favorite one. Capture and insert scene. Command Command shift if you're in key commands. Otherwise, you can go to create and then capture and insert scene. Okay. Next, let's clean this up and get it a little bit more ready to perform. Okay. 18. Setting up Scenes: Okay. So next, we have some creative decisions to make. Because I don't want to just play this tune, right? Like if I just hit play on the whole tune, then there's no point in doing any of this. I might as well leave it in an arrangement with you, right? So I want to make this kind of more fluid, like I can do a lot of stuff. So let's go here. Let's select all this stuff, and I'm just going to pull it down to give me some room at the top. Now, I think pretty sure I want to start with this. Maybe I want to leave that going. This can come in next. I'm just trying to put together an arrangement. I don't even need to do it this much. But I want it so that worst case scenario, I can just launch scenes over here, right? So I can go over here and I can press command R to rename. I can say, this is in maybe this is intro two verse bridge. Command R, chorus, et cetera. So now I can launch the intro stuff. That's this thing. At some point, we're going to move on intro two, which I think is the same. So I can probably get rid of one of those. Then we can to verse. Okay, now let's say I want to go off strips. Take these out. A minor. Take this in. Yeah. Back that figure a weird corpjtGreat. So now I basically have it. So if this is what you want to do with your music, what you need to do next is arrange your eclipse so that they're allowing you to do everything you need to do. Let yourself kind of be free of the original track and experiment, get a little different with what you're putting together. Okay. Okay, so we've got our scenes set up now. Let's add a little bit more to this just to make it flow a little bit better. So let's talk about some transitions and things we can do. Okay. 19. Creating transition scenes: Okay, now, if this is what you're building, it might very well be that you have not just one track here, but a whole bunch of tracks. You want to build a whole set, a whole performance, right? So let's pretend we have two tracks here. So I'm just going to copy our first track into our second track. So let's set up some transition stuff, right? You might not need it because if you have two good tracks, you could always just leave the drums going on one and start the other one and kind just piecemeal your way to the next one. But if you want to add more material, Let's do this. I'm going to add another track here. And I'm just going to let's put this in the transition right here. Let's just put it here, and then we so it starts while this last scene is still playing. So we're going to pull it down to just that. Then we'll start creeping in some of these other things. And pin there. Okay, let's take away those. Now we're back in to the next stand. All right. So all I did there was add another drum clip that could kind of serve as the glue to get us to the next track, right? So you can do that all day long. Now, there's also a ton of effects you can use that you could just kind of crank them up and then let the ambience drift away for a second and then drop down into the next track if you're doing multiple tracks. So we'll talk about that in the next section when we get into performance effects. So let's go to that right now. Okay 20. Mappings and Controllers for Performance: Okay, let's circle back around to performance controllers. And we've talked about this earlier in this class. But now that we have a set figured out, or at least the start of one. Let's look at how these can be used. Okay? So first, I'm going to turn my push on so we can kind of see how that maps onto our session. Okay, as soon as that comes online, you're going to see that box around parts of the clip slot grid here. Okay? There it is. So we have this orange kind of box. So that shows us what we can see on the push when it comes to launching clips. I can navigate around using the arrow keys, but that's what that would be. If I was going to perform this with the push, I would go into the mode on the push that shows me the clip slot grid, and then I could just launch clips, you know, all day long. It'd be great. It is great. If I want to use something outside of this orange box, I can move the box around. Okay, so in this case, I don't need to do any mapping, like what we talked about before, because the push is set up just to see it and map to it. If I wanted to map a different controller, I could Let's say let's go back to my remote zero S L, this one. And let's map that. Now, I only have eight buttons on this. I don't have a whole clip slot grit, but I could map those to launching my scenes. In order to do that, I'm going to go command Mm. Click the first scene and hit a button, second scene, button, third scene, button, fourth. Go down that way, even if they're not labeled. That's it. I turn off Mi mapping. Now I can launch those scenes using my controller here. So it's these There. There we go. It's card to navigate this camera. Okay, so let's launch the first scene. Okay, let's jump to the third scene. Tip all the way to the. Oh, that one silent. Let's get that we going in. Okay. That's great. Now, I don't have enough buttons to queue individual clips here with this particular controller. But if I did have a bunch of buttons, I could do it. So look for that when you're shopping for a controller for performance if you are. Now, once we get to this point in our Ableton adventure, we're going to unlock a couple little secret things. Okay? There's a couple of things that don't appear on the screen, but only in certain situations, they do. So let's go to a new video and talk about those. 21. Secret Mapping Controls: All right. So sometimes it happens when you're recording hundreds of videos that something goes wrong. And that's the case here. So, I'm done filming this class, and to make a long story short, this video that you're about to watch didn't capture any audio. My Mc wasn't working or something. So I'm just going to re record it. And the only reason I'm telling you that is because I have to go back and recreate this. This track is fine as it is, but I don't have this all set up. So that's why there's nothing here because I'm going back and doing it that way. Luckily, when this happens, usually, I can do it without anyone knowing because I wear the same clothes every day. But in this case, you're going to know. Happens kind a lot, actually. Anyway, so here's the thing that we're going to talk about these secret hidden controls. Now, Okay. When I was walking around and showing you the mini devices that I have laying around here, controllers and stuff, I showed you this foot pedal, right? The reason that I use a foot pedal. My old performance rig, when I used to perform a lot, This is really weird, but I performed on these, this set of gloves. So I had gloves and they were mapped to all different sounds. It's kind of like the thing Imogen Heap is doing, if you're familiar with her, although I was doing it ten years before her, not that it matters, but I'm just saying. But in order to interact with my computer, I needed to use foot pedals because I couldn't touch anything. It would just trigger a bunch of sounds. So I relied heavily on these secret things that are happening. If I go into Mi mapping mode, we're familiar with this now. I can map anything to do something, but I also get a couple new things. I get these things down here, and I get a big play button down here, right? So that's what this is all about. What these are going to do is let you advance up or down. So I'm going to map a button on my Mi keyboard, to this down arrow, okay? So, what that means is that the highlighted scene here, I can scroll through it by mapping, okay? So I have a foot pedal that is lined up to that, two of them, actually, one that goes up and one that goes down. And it lets me navigate around like this, right? I can also, if I go back to MD mapping, map this play button and this stop button. What that's going to do is it's going to launch the scene that I'm on. I can say, I want to launch the fifth scene. I go taptap tap tap, and then hit the play button, this one to launch that scene. I could also use any of these to launch just the clip on whatever is highlighted. I could if I wanted to launch that keys clip that's there, I could go up and then map this to something to launch it from there. So these little things only exist when you're mapping. If I go out of mapping mode, they go away. They're hidden. So they're super valuable, not just for foot pedals, but if you're trying to map anything to a controller with, like, a finite number of buttons, which all controllers have, Okay. So keep an eye out for those. If you're trying to do an elaborate performance setup, these can be really valuable. Now, there's another thing that's hidden away here, and that is a good old fashioned cross fader. If you've seen someone DJ before, like with two records, they had a cross fader to go back and forth between the two records. We have a cross fader, too, but it's hidden away. So let's queue that up and do some fun stuff with it. 22. Crossfader Setup: Okay, so if you've ever seen a DJ perform live and they maybe use two records. They have a mixer in the middle. And what they can do is they can queue up the one record, and they have something called the cross fader, which is a fader that moves left and right. So while while you're hearing this record, they move the fader all the way over here, to where you can see me. And then if they switch to this record, they move the fader over there, right? So that's the one you're hearing is the one where the cross fader goes. Now, you can do the same thing here. First, we have to find that cross fader. It does exist. It's moved in live 12. It is not where it used to be. So I live 12, we're going to go down here. We hit this button to show the mixer, right? But if we hit the little arrow to the right of it, there's a couple other things we can show or hide, and one of them is the cross fader. So when we enable the cross fader, we get two things. First, we get the actual cross fader, which is over here on our master track, and then we get these Abs all over the place. You may have guessed how this works already. So what you can do is you can say, this is A, and let's say This is B. I'm just going to kind of arbitrarily split this. This isn't really how I would do it. I'll show you how I'd really do it in a minute. Okay, let's put this as B. Okay. So now, A is my record on the left, and B is my record on the right. So with my cross fader, let's just launch a big scene. Let's launch. Here's a. Here's B, right? Okay. So you could do some cool things with that. You could set up some tracks that are B and some that are A. One thing that would be fun to do in this case is maybe leave everything A except for this extra drum layer that we added and that's B. Okay? So now. Let's just get that going all the way. Now we're going to hear our full track. Everything's cool. Now it's pull in a little bit of that extra B. Maybe let's go all the extra beat. Right? Let's launch our next track. Let's pull it back in. So that's a great performance tool. That can be a perfect transition. Just keep this drum beat going the whole thing. And then when you need it, when you need a transition, pull your cross fader over and then pull it back. There's another way we can use the cross fader. That is a really popular trick that a lot of people do. And it's a super helpful trick. Let me show you that. Let's go to a new video. Okay. 23. Setting Up Effects for Performance: All right. Check this out. So we're going to incorporate a whole bunch of things that we know. First, we're going to use and Audio effect R. Let's go to audio effect racks. Let's go down here and let's find there's a famous one that's used for this. And it is called fade to Gray. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put fade to gray on a bus here. I'm going to call everything. I'm going to turn this fade to gray up all the way. This already has a reaver bonnet. That's cool. We'll roll with it. I'm going to make this effect B. Let's make both effects B, even though I'm not really using B. Now I need to send a whole bunch of all my tracks to A or to my effect bus A. Oh. Okay. So now let's review what's happening here. I've sent a whole bunch of that signal from all of my tracks over to this bus. On this bus is this giant fade to gray effect. This is going to basically take in all of the sound that's happening and turn it into a wash of noise that we can use as a transition. Okay. And then we assigned that effect to the B deck with our cross fader. So here's what that's going to let me do. Okay? We're good. Let's add our second drum. All right, fun. Okay, here comes that transition. And I'm just going to pull this cross fader over. There it is. I'm going to go to the next track. I'm going to pull it back down. Okay? I'm not getting as much out of that fade to gray as I want right now. But it kind of doesn't matter. You can just build up huge effects. Echo fuzz. Let's just make something crazy here. So effects. All right. That sounds good. All right. Now let's do that transition again. And then into the next tune, pull it back in. And then if we want to be even more extra, let's map that cross fade. Cross fader. So I'm going to go to Mi mapping. I'm going to hit that. I'm going to put it on this fader. Okay. I'm going to get out of midi mapping. Now I've got that controller right on here. So if I want to do a big soh of effects, there it is, and then out, right? Really simple. You don't have to use a cross fader that way, but it's a good trick. 24. DJ Performance Template: Okay. Now, if you're really interested in getting into DJ, let me give you a little bit of a shortcut here. I'm going to make a new set Command don't say this. Okay. Now I'm going to go over here to my templates, and you should have a DJ set template that comes with Live 12 by default. I'm just going to double click on that. Okay. And here we go. We've got all kind of fun stuff happening here. So there's some content that's been sent over to Session view. So it has some kind of placeholder content here. I don't think there's really anything here. And this placeholder content might even be something that I put in here. So don't worry about that. But check out the effects you have set up. We already have four sens created. Over here, delay echo, filter delay and reverb. You've got some scenes created. You probably have your cross fader setup. Yeah, you have an A and B and your cross fader. So if you're more interested in DJ, check out this DJ set template and it'll help you get started. Again, yours might not look like mine. I think I've made some adjustments to mine that are not in the default. 25. The Mixing and Mastering Process: All right. Up next, we're going to talk about mixing and mastering. Now, couple of caveats here. I have two huge classes on mixing and mastering. This is a really big topic, and there's an art to this. It takes practice to get good at. So we're going to do two things in this section. One is that I'm going to show you the tools and techniques of mixing and mastering in Ableton Live 12 because that's what this class is about. And two is I'm going to show you some methods and some strategies for mixing and mastering. But what you're about to see in this next section is not like a super comprehensive tutorial on how to mix and master. This is going to get you in the ballpark and it's going to teach you what you need to do. But takes a lot of practice, and there's a lot more that goes into this. So Again, I have these huge classes on these two topics that I would encourage you to check out if you really want to get good at this. So that being said, let's go into how mixing and mastering works. So first, let's define what these two things are. First, mixing. That means we're going to go through our session. We're going to get all our levels just right. We're going to make sure nothing's popping out. We're going to get it sounding exactly how we want. There's more to it than just adjusting levels. But that's a big part of it. So mastering is probably the more misunderstood one of the two. So in mastering, what we're typically doing is our mix is done. We're happy with our mix, and we bounce it down to a stereo audio file, and that is what gets mastered. If there's something wrong with the mix, you have to go back a step. The mastering is just working on that stereo file. And it's really just to add some extra shine to it and make sure it sounds good in as many places as possible. Okay. Okay. So we'll get to that when we get to mastering. So first, let's start off with mixing, though. So here we go. Okay. 26. Session Organization: Okay, so the track that we're going to mix and master. This is just a quick thing I threw together just for the purpose of having a track. It is, you know, still me and I'm still in my weird little synth wave bubble. So I just really love synth wave it's kind of a dark cyberpunk thing with a little bit of trip hop mixed in. Basically Okay. You get the point. So we're going to use this as our example track, right? So first things first, we need to organize our session a little bit, and it's going to help us do a better job at mixing it. So. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of any tracks I'm not using. We see this track here. Is there anything on it? There is, so that's good. So I don't have any empty tracks. If you do, it's fine. It's very common for me to have a handful of tracks that I made, I put something on them, and then I decided I didn't want it. So I've got these empty tracks just floating around. If you have any of those? Delete them. Get rid of them. We don't have those. Okay, now let's organize our track order a little bit. So here's our base. This is Harmony things. This is a pad, so also harmony things. Here's our bells. These are also bells, and here's our drums. So these are ordered in pretty good Okay. In a pretty good way. I might group a few things together. I would definitely do this in a bigger session. I don't really need to do it because this is kind of a small session, but I'm going to do it anyway, just for example. So both of these are harmony things. Okay. So I'm going to group those together. I'm going to click both of them, and I'm going to command G, A's going to make a group, and I'm going to rename it Harmony. I'm just going to tuck that away for a second. So now we've got harmony stuff there. Base is okay. This is pad. I could put this pad into harmony also. It's not a bad idea. Let's do it. Now Harmony has those three things in there. Let's make a Bells group, command G, Bells. Then we'll leave our drums by themselves. Next, I should label each individual track to what it is. This is base harmony. Let's call this Let's call this dark harmony. And this one's a bit brighter. Okay. I just want a way to know what is what. So I'm going to call this brighter harmony or just bright harmony. I have dark and bright. Here I have this pad. Sounds like this. This is bells. One of these is really affected. Yeah. And this one's not. Okay, so I'm going to put this one on top. Bells. Affect bells. All right? And then drums. Cool. So now, if I pull up my mixer, this is going to be a little bit easier to deal with now. We've got bass harmony, bells, drums. Sweet. Nice and organized. I don't think I'm using these returns at all, but I normally might smush these and just make them really small. But I don't need the screen real estate. It's fine. But maybe I'll do it anyway, just for fun. Now I want the mixer. Nice and big. Cool. All right. Let's move on to the next step. Okay. 27. "Printing" MIDI Tracks: All right. The next step in the process, we're going to print MIDI tracks. Now, this is not something that you have to do. This is not something that everybody does. This is something that I've gotten the habit of doing. So I'm going to show it to you. If you decide you don't want to do this, it's probably fine. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my MTI tracks like this one, and I'm going to render them as audio. Now, the reason is, Audio tracks are a lot more permanent and easier to deal with for me than midi tracks. When a synthesizer makes a sound, there's a lot of variables that go into it, and at this point, I really want to eliminate variables, right? I want to make sure I know exactly what's going to happen and exactly what it's sounding like. And so making these into audio tracks just kind of makes them permanent, basically. So there's a few different ways I can do it, but the easiest way is just to go control click on the track, and then we're going to go to freeze and flatten track. It's going to take a second, and then it's basically just going to turn this into an audio track. Cool. So now that we've done that, now that we have an audio track, there's kind no going back. So what we should do is immediately save this as So we're going to go to save Live set as this was called the brilliant title of track five. We're going to call this track five mix or mix down, whatever you want. Here's track five mix. Because if I want to go back and change any of these notes, I can't really do it now. Save this as something new. Don't overwrite the version you had before. I'm going to do the same thing on this track. We're using flatten. And on this track, Okay. And that's it. That's all my MD tracks. So now, I've got a whole bunch of audio. Again, you don't have to do this step. It's just something I've gotten the habit of doing, and it's made my life a little bit easier. Okay. Onto the next step. Okay. 28. EQ All The Things!: Okay, up next, we're going to Q all the things. If you don't know this reference I'm making, Q all the things. There was, like, this Internet meme long time ago. An early Internet me. I think it was clean all the things. And it was this kind of cartoon person like holding up a broom and screaming, clean all the things. Anyway, your parents know it. Q all the things. So we're going to put a whole bunch of Qs on this, and we're going to do two things with each one of those Q The first thing is we are going to put a high pass filter. So basically, we're just going to roll off the low low stuff. The stuff that no one's going to hear and it's just going to cause problems for us. We're just going to roll off the low end. And the second thing we're going to do see if we can find any frequencies that we want to boost or cut if there's any problematic stuff or if we just get a better tone. So let's start with Let's go from the bottom up. Let's start with our drums here. Here's our drums. For all of these, I'm going to use the Q eight. I'm basically going to put an E Q eight on everything. And I'm going to make this Q nice and big so I can see it. I'm not that big. What we're going to do is I'm going to turn off all three. I'm just going to do this first one. We're going to do a high pass more aggressive high pass. I'm going to put this right around 30 or so. That's pretty low. Now, this is drums, we might let it go a little bit lower, but let's just hear it. Let's just loop right here and solo the reason we're rolling off the low end. Let's turn it off for a second. Okay. We're not really hearing it. We see that the real meat of this kick right in this area. So we're not really doing anything to disturb it here. We're just trying to make sure there's no mud down in the low end, that's going to make it hard to mix. So we're just going to cut off all the low stuff. Now, if I want to try to sweeten this, I might make another point. I'm going to tighten that up a little bit with the e, see if there's anything, do I want to get a little more thump out of this? That? I don't think I need it. That little would sound kind of nice. I'm going to add in just to touch of that. But, that one sounds pretty good. Let's go to our next track, which is our affected bells. Okay. Same thing here. Let's look where it is. And then turn off the And I'm just going to go up to where I see that signal and just brush my filter right up against it. Right around there. Just so that I'm sure nothing is coming through down here. That's pretty good. Let's leave that one there. Let's go to our unaffected bells. This is the same pattern. We do have some stuff down here, but don't really need it. To explore this little node. Now, I don't want to boost right here where the main signal is because that's really just going to make it. I'm really looking for any frequency that's not represented well that I might like. Yeah, I don't think I need anything here. This sounds pretty good. All right. I'm going to move forward and do the rest of these. Maybe I'll do it in fast forward. Um, So I'm not going to do this group. I don't need to do this group because I've done these two individually. So I'm going to skip over that one and go to this pad. This pad isn't happening here. So we can see a nice, there is a lot happening down here. But cleaning that stuff up is probably going to help me. That's going to make everything a lot easier. Let's go on to the next one. The bright harmony. Okay, let's go back to where. Right. Let's see if I can. It see what I like. I like that. I'm going to stick with that. Let's go on to our darary You think with that. All right. And last our base. All right. This one's a little trickier. That's why I did that actually ordered. So our fundamental is here. Okay. So I want to do the same thing. You hear that? That's really where that is. I do want to chop it out right about 30 if I do. Okay. All right. I just want to make sure I don't take away any of the poof from this base. But if there's anything cluttering up down here, I want to get rid of it. And I think we've done that. As for fun. All right. I think we got it. So we've cleaned up the low end. We've added a little sparkle to a couple other spots, and we've got this in pretty good shape. Okay, now let's start thinking about dynamics. Okay. 29. Dynamics: Okay. The next thing we need to do is a little bit of dynamic work. Okay? So we're going to do a similar thing where we're going to throw a compressor onto most of our tracks, maybe all of them. Let's start with the drums. So if you remember, and I'm sure you do what a compressor does, how it works. It's going to smush our dynamic range. Now the reason we want to do this when we're mixing is the smaller the dynamic range, the louder everything can get. And if you want to learn about something crazy and wild, Google, the loudness wars, that'll tell you everything you need to know about this phenomenon. But basically, we want our music to be typically, maybe not always, but typically we want our music to be kind of loud, we want it to be as loud as it can be in the mix. And this is going to help. Now, we don't want to just flatten out all of our dynamics, right? That's going to make a very boring mix. But we do want to taper it down a little bit and kind of control it. So here's a quick way to know whether or not you need to add a little compression. When we look at the meters in Ableton, you're going to see two things at once. I think we talked about this earlier, but you're going to see Let's go to our drums here. You're going to see these little red lines, and you're also going to see the green or yellow. See where that line is sitting. The distance between that green or yellow one and those stuck ones, those red ones that sit at the top is the dynamic range. The space between those is the dynamic range. What you're actually looking at is those red ones that stick at the top. Those are your peaks, and the more moving one is your RMS filter, which is like an average of all the sound. So what we want to do is take those peaks down a little bit so that the distance between that and the RMS value is not as much. And a compressor is designed to do exactly that. So this one has a lot of dynamic range because there's times where it goes down to just that high hat right there and it's really quiet. Then we have that snare hit loud. Let's take this down. Give it a good amount of compression. So our ratio is at four that's probably good for this. Okay. Another thing I want to do here is I want to set this to peak so that I'm really compressing the peaks. And then I want to turn make up on. Okay. So my distance is better. It's not nothing. If I really wanted to go at it, I do that. But I don't want to do that. So I don't need too much. Right around there is good. Drums are going to have a lot of variety in the dynamic range. Let's try these bells, which should be a lot less. Okay? So there's our peaks. So there's really not much needed here, but let's give it a bit. Makeup for threshold down a little bit. Just to touch. And now we have more volume here, but we can pull that down a lot easier. Okay? Let's move on. Okay, that's pretty good. Here's our group, so we don't need to do that one. Let's go to this pad. We got to go to a spot where the pad is happening. B here. All right, there's really not much here, but let's add a little bit just to help us control it anyway. It's slipping a little bit. All right? That's good. Let's go on to this bright harmony. Let's get to a spot where we're hearing that. Where is that one? That dark harmony? Where is All right. Let's get to this base. Take a look. This actually is very flat dynamically because it's literally do the same thing. So you don't really need anything but for good measure. Out. All right. All right. Now that we've got our tracks tamed a little bit, I always think of this step as these two steps, the Q and the compressor as the tracks, getting them all over the place. So let's move on to kind of sweetening them up and doing some stereo stuff. 30. Mid-Side EQ and Imaging: Okay. Up next, we want to focus on the stereo feel of it. We also called a stereo imaging. That is to say, how much this track fills out the the stereo field, right? That's the space in between our speakers and our speakers. And sometimes even past our speakers. So We're not going to do this by just going and randomly panning stuff. We could say, we want this pad a little bit left, this pad a little bit right, this one center, these affected bells a little over here. We could do it that way. And I actually might kind of like that for these two pads. That's okay. But what we're really going to do is what's called midside Q. So what this is going to do is we're going to look at How much of our signal is out on the sides and how much is up in the middle. Let me head down here. Mid means middle, middle, and sides. So what we want to do is we want to go into each individual track and try to add some more sound to either the mid or the side, which is which The conventional thinking on this is let's divide all of our instruments into two categories. One is lead and the second is supporting. What is the lead thing in this track? Common lead would be like your vocals, if there's a solo instrument, anything like that. In this case, I'm going to say it's probably the drums and the bass that are kind of the lead thing. So the lead thing, I'm going to focus mostly on the mid and the other things. I'm going to let have a little bit of more motion on the side. So let's go to our drums here. Now, I'm not going to change this EQ. I'm going to add another one. Here's another Q. This one, I'm going to put into mid side, and this is the drum. So we want a lot of this in the mid. So what we do is just give it a little push. Actually, this is the face. Sorry. But let's push a little bit on the mids and maybe take a little bit away on the side. Your real money for this is the mid range. The mid range is where we can really hear the stereo affect the best. Not so much in the low stuff, and not so much in the best. Okay, so there's not a ton I can do here because it's so low. But let's go to this. And in fact, in this case, I could do this right on this group, right? Right here. Instead of doing it individually, I'm basically going to do the same thing for all three of these, so I'm going to do it right on the group. So I'm going to put an EQ eight on this group. I'm going to go to mid side. Okay. Okay. And these pads are more supporting, so you give them a little x side. Oh, you can really feel. Great. Bells bells. Go to mid side. Pull the middle down. Boost our sides. Okay? That's really going to start to feel really warm. Our drums are pretty much going to leave alone here. We already have some stuff happening, pulled out the sides, added the mids. That's great. So if you want to do even more, you can do a lot more than this. You could put some kind of stereo effect right before this EQ. We have a lot of different things that could be used as a stereo effect. This LFO, for sure. Multi band dynamics could be used to increase the stereo effect. Auto pan, auto filter, those types of things, Auto pan, especially. So if you want more stereo effect, you can totally do that. All right. Next, we're going to move on to metering. So let's just take a look, or, sorry, listen to what we've done so far. A lot of what we've done has really messed up what our mix was, right? Because we did compression. We added a lot of stuff. Let's see if it still feels like our track, just out of curiosity. Oops let's turn our soloing off. What is solo? So here we are. So what I hear is, I mean, that bass is fine, the drums are fine. Here's my synths are too loud and that bell is too quiet. So it's time to get into adjusting levels. Let's go to a new video for that one. 31. Gain Staging: Okay. Let's start adjusting our volumes to get our tracks sounding really good. Now, the first thing we want to do here. Okay. Is look at our mixer. What we're going to be doing is adjusting some of these volumes, and what we want to do is be able to take them up or down just a little bit and not worry about anything else. So if you have automation on any of these faders, right? Like you drew some automation here, and you did that kind of thing. Now you can see the red dot here and you can see that there's automation there. That's fine. We don't want to deal with that, but it's cool that it's there. Here's what we're going to do to get around that. We're going to leave your automation there because there's a reason you did it, it sounds good, right? But For the purposes of mixing, what we're basically going to do is take that fader, put it inside of another fader so that we can adjust the whole fader, and it's very easy to do. We're just going to click on it, Command g. We're going to make a one track group. This was base. This is now base. Rename this base. Close it up. There you go. Now you have a single fader that is for base. Your automation inside here, is still going to happen. We're going to leave it doing what it's doing. But we're going to have a single fader that is not automated that we can use for our base now. Cool. So do that on any track that has automation on the volume. Okay. The next thing we're going to do is called gain staging. What that means is that we're going to set the gain of one thing and then start matching everything around it. So, what should you start with? You can start with anything, but I would recommend starting with something that's going to have the most power. If you're making dance music, start with drums or even better the kick. Most of the time, the drums are a pretty good place to start. Okay? So what I'm going to do is turn everything off here. I'm not going to solo it because I want to slowly start adding these in. So now we're just going to have drums. Now, here's what we're going to do for our first stage. There's a ton of different ways you can do this. If somebody tells you different, they're probably right. This is just the way I do it is the way I was taught to do it. It works well for me. Go over to your mains. Make sure that is sitting right at zero. We're going to leave that right there. Now, this box up here is our peak. It shows where our highest volume is. On our signal. What we're going to do is we're going to adjust our drum volume until our peak on our main channel is hitting negative ten. We're at negative one right now. Remember, zero is the top, so we need to come down. Reset it. Number seven. Down a little bit more. All right. Pretty good. 10.1. I'll take it. All right. So now we have a baseline for our volume. Okay. The next thing I'm going to do is focus on the base. Again, you could do something else, but the base in drums are usually kind of one of the harder things to deal with. So I'm going to deal with that next. So leaving the drums where they are, I'm going to pull my base way down, and turn it on, and I'm just going to push it up until it feels good. I'm not going to worry about levels at this point or like numbers and negative ten and whatever. I'm just going to kind of eyeball it, or as we say ball it. That's not a real term. But here we go. They stopped. Okay. Okay, I want this base to be really pronounced because it's kind of driving the whole track. So I'm going to put it right there. That's maybe a little hotter than we're used to. Now, you might be thinking like, Hey, man, this is so quiet. You've got this so low. That's okay. We want to leave it because he. We'll talk about that in a minute. Now, I'm tempted to put a side chain on this base, but I'm not going to do it right now. But we should have not affected our main peak too much. Let's see where we're at. Yeah, we're still good. Okay, we're up to 9.7. But pretty good. So we still should right be around the range of negative ten. So make sure that now that we have these two parts done, make sure that this is feeling nice and good. One thing you can do here is if you feel like it sounds too quiet, turn up your volume, turn up your headphones, your speakers, whatever. Don't turn up anything in live. Turn up your speakers. Just make it louder so that it feels how you want it to feel. But don't do it with any of these and certainly not your master. Okay. So get those two sounding great, and then we'll move on. In the next video, we're going to stack everything else up. Okay. 32. Blending All the Tracks: The next thing we're going to do is we're going to take all of these down and we're going to blend all of these in. Again, we're just going to use our ear, but we do have a goal for our master fader. This fader, remember, we got it landing right around negative ten. Every time we push one of these up into the mix, we're going to add more to our master fader. Our goal at the end of this is to have our master fader sitting around negative six. Doesn't have to be dead on, but that's what we're aiming for. The way I usually do this is I'm not going to think about my master fader for the moment. I'm going to do one pass, just blending everything in by ear, and then seeing where we're at and then doing another pass. So Do these in the order of importance to your track. So whatever the next most important thing is, do that next. In our case, we did drums and bass. If you have vocals, those would definitely be the next most important thing if they're not more important. In my case, we've got this harmony stuff and the bells stuff. That's it. So let's do the harmony stuff first. Okay. So I have this group. And I'm going to leave that group at zero, and then I'm just going to mix with the three different tracks. I think that's going to be better for this. Okay. So let's do it. I got to go to a spot where they are happening. Let's loop that spot. And here they are. I got to the group. I think that. Yeah. Again, I was getting a weird gap in the base, and it was because of that fake automation I put in it just to show that. So I'm going to get rid of that. Okay. That's good. Let's add our next one. Add these in slow. Err on the side of less. Whenever you're pushing these up, push it up until you feel like you have just enough. Okay? Don't feel like you're pushing it too hard. Go for just enough, especially in your first pass. Very common to do multiple passes of this. Okay, let's go to a spot where that pad is happening, which is out here. Like that. All right. Let's get these bells in here. So for the group, I'm going to take that back up to zero. Turn it on. Now, for our individual bells. Let's go to these first. Okay. Are the affected ones happening here? No. Let's go to here. Pretty good. I want to check one quick thing on that track. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm pretty happy with that. Let's see. We got up to 5.8 negative 5.8. Remember our goal is negative six. That's pretty darn good. Let's reset that, and then let's just go to kind of a big spot. I only got up to negative eight. Here we go. Negative 7.9. Negative six. Okay. So we're in great shape. We got negative six. That means we have a little bit more. We could go. We could push it a little bit harder with something if we wanted to because we've got the room. The head room is the amount we have left over here. It's negative six to up to zero, right? So we have negative six dB of head room. Room to spare. And as we get into mastering, we really want to have about negative six of head room for mastering to do its job. So we're in great shape. We don't have to push it. You end up with negative ten here, that's fine. That'll just give mastering more room to work. If you end up with a lot less, if you end up with negative 20, then I'd consider mixing it a little bit louder, just pushing all of these a little bit more. But for us, I think we're in great shape just like this. If we wanted to do another pass, we totally could go back and maybe leave the bass and drums where they were and just work on individual elements. Maybe take them out and then ease them back in and see if you get to a different spot. Okay. Last thing to do on this topic is to talk about how to render these things out. So let's do that next. 33. Render Settings: Okay. Last thing we need to do with our mix is bounce it out. Because remember, when we get to mastering, which we're going to do in the next section, typically, not always, but typically we master from a stereo audio track. So let's go to our export settings. So we're going to go to file Export Audio. Okay, I don't think we've gone through a real heavy details of this yet. So here's what we've got. We've got all these different sections. So first, selection, what are we bouncing out? Almost always you want this to say main. That means you're master fader, you're bouncing out. We could bounce out any individual tracks or all of our tracks individually as individual tracks or stems. You could also do selected tracks only. Now, where do you want this to start and end? Make sure that these are correct. I do have a little gap at the beginning. So if these aren't right, or if you aren't sure if they're right or not, here's a quick trick you can do. Zoom out. Go to the beginning, which is right here. No, that's not the beginning. Yeah. This is the beginning. Put your loop brace around the whole track. From beginning to end, maybe even leave a little extra at the end. There's beginning to end. Then click on that loop brace. Now you've selected everything you want. Now when you go to export audio and video, that's going to be accurate. Okay? Okay. So moving on, Render options include return and main effects. We don't have any returns here, so that's off, but you could turn that on if you're using any return effects. Render as loop. We don't want to do that for a full song that we're bouncing out. That's not what we want. Convert tomato. We don't want that. You probably don't want this. Normalize is going to boost the volume of everything up as much as it can. If this is going to be mastered, leave normalizing off. If you're not going to master it, but wanted to sound like it's mastered in a quick and dirty way, you could turn normalizing on. Sometimes it's fine just to make everything louder, really fast. But if it's going to be mastered, don't do that. Analysis file, we don't need that. Sample rate. Now, this actually is kind of important. You want to make sure that this sample rate is the sample rate that you're actually working on. So if I go back to my main live window, I see up here I am working at 48 kilohertz. So that's what I want this to be 48,000. Now, there is a possibility that I'm working with some samples here that are not 48 kilohertz, that are not 48,000 samples per second. I might have some 4041 samples in there. If I do, that's okay. Live is going to have to convert those 44 ones up to 48, and that can introduce some noise barely audible in most cases situation, but there is a way to minimize that to hold on to that thought for just a second. Then we'll come back to it. Down here, you have three different formats you could output your track two. PCM is your full quality audio file, your big audio file that you want. You definitely want that to be on file type. If this is going to mastering, you want this to be a wave, maybe an AIF file. Don't use flack files for mastering. If you want to use that for some purpose, there are purposes to use flack files, but almost always for mastering wave is what we want. Bit depth. Let's leave that at 16, or you can raise that if you want. Dither options. PO R one. Okay. What dithering is going to do is it's basically adding a very, very low amount of noise. You won't be able to hear it, but it's adding it in there to help cover up any sample conversion errors. So back to what we were just talking about. If you have some samples that are 4041 and some that are 48 and live is going to have to do that conversion when it exports it. The dither can help you here. Okay? So if you're in that case, leave it on. If you're not in that case, and everything is 48 k and you're 100% sure about that, leave it on anyway because it's not going to hurt. Okay. And if you aren't sure, leave it on. You could change it to no dither or one of these other algorithms for your Dier. I don't know what all these do. I just know that Pow R one is what someone told me wants to use and that's what I've been using. There you go. Those are the settings for your main audio file. You can also kick out an MP three at the same time. Turn that off. Now we're going to get two files. We're going to get our big wave file and a little MP three file. You do not want an MP three file for mastering. No good. MP three files are great for e mailing to your friends. Okay. Um, but to go to mastering or to do any real serious work, we want the PCM file. Video. Now, if there was video in our project, which there is not, we could export a video file. It's not letting me click that because there's no video here. But if we imported a video to this, live can play that video. So if we were doing a film scoring project and we had a video going and then we were scoring to it, we could export a video, which would be that video plus our audio. Okay. If you want to import a video file, you can just drag it in the way, same way you drag in an audio file. But there's nothing here, so we don't need to do that. Then we hit port. Now, let's give it a name. Don't name it final. Because then you're going to make a change and then you're going to name it final final, and then you're going to name that one final final final. Then you're going to name the next one final for real final and it goes on and on and on. Don't do that. Do this instead. Mix the date 2924. Which is what today is. Let's put the date in there. Or if you really want, you could always do V one, then you've got V two, V three, and you know the highest number is always most accurate one. Either way, that is just fine. Then we're going to make sure we're a nice spot, and we're going to save it. And it's going to render, and then you've got your file all ready for mastering or to be done with it if you don't want to do mastering. So let's go to the last section in this class and talk about mastering. Okay. 34. What is Mastering?: Okay. Lots to say in this video. So we're going to get into mastering now. Now, before we get into mastering, a few things that we need to know about mastering. I already told you the big, big misconception, which is that mastering happens in your mix. Not true. Although, at the end of this, I will talk about one kind of situation where it kind of does. But for the most part, we mix, then we bounce, and then we master a two channel final version, this mix wave that we have. So we already know that. Let's start with talking about terminology just real quick. Don't need to spend a lot of time on this, but I want you to be aware that there is a growing movement of professionals that are starting to use the term mastering less and less. It's kind of falling out of favor. Instead, we're saying maximizing. That's my preferred word, but also people are using finishing. So you might see maximizing finishing mastering. The reason is, There's a lot of language around pro audio and probably everywhere in our society that is considered by some to be oppressive language and having a master slave relationship, which is a term we use in audio all the time, which is really strange. But we're trying to get rid of terms like that. So Master is kind of going away, but. So just know that when you encounter mastering, it might be called mastering. It might be called finishing. It might be called maximizing. I'm going to try to use the term maximizing. But it's a relatively new term, so I might slip up and call it mastering. Okay, that's thing number one. T number two, the goal of mastering loud and clean. That's what we want. Clean is maybe relative, right, because you might have, just really raw music, and that's okay, too, but we want it loud and let's say clear, loud and clear. Now, let's talk about this loud thing for a minute. If you're like me, you're thinking, how can this song be loud. Loud is a function of the dial on my stereo or my audio player. That's how loud the track is. I'm just going to turn it up or turn it down. That's true. I always used to think of it, remember those old beer commercials where they would say, it's the coldest beer, and you're like, cold is a function of my refrigerator, not your beer? That's really strange. But it's not really like that. The reason is When you hear a song on the radio, let's say you're driving down the road and you're listening to the radio and you hear a song. Then you hear another song after that. If the next song is just quieter. Like you didn't do anything to your stereo, it just is quieter than the previous song. So you reach for the knob and you turn it up, right? Because the music you're hearing now is quiet, relative to the previous one. Then the next song comes on and it's loud, so it blasts you away. Now you change the radio station. Suddenly, the radio station does not want to play your music anymore because it doesn't fit in with everything else. That's the loudness that we're talking about here. So our goal here is to really prevent people from reaching for the dial, to turn it down or turn it up, right? We want it to mix in, to blend with everything else. And the trend right now, and this is true for the last probably 20 years, is to try to get things as loud as possible. Just push everything up against the ceiling of how loud we can get before it distorts and try to get it to just sit there. So that it sounds as loud as or even better louder than the other music around it. So that's what the loudness thing is all about. If you want to read some interesting history on this, you can Google the loudness wars. That's what it's called. More on that once we get in the weeds. Two more quick things. One, is that what we're going to be talking about here is digital mastering or mastering for the purposes of streaming services. Um, there is a separate kind of mastering that is vinyl mastering. Vinyl mastering is a completely different art, and I don't know very much about it. So I've never mastered anything for vinyl. And I wouldn't. If someone came up to me and said, well, you master this for vinyl, I would say no, because it's such a different animal. We're not really going to deal with that. I'm assuming most of you are not mastering to vinyl, but if you are, you really need to get a pro who's experienced mastering for vinyl. And that's not me. And then the last thing that I just want to say here is just like I said, for the mixing class or the mixing segment of this class, this is going to be an overview. This is not going to be detailed. I have a whole other class, like many hours devoted to the finer points of getting a master just right. So we're just going to do a couple of videos here to talk about how you can master things in Live 12. The tools we have there and how I would make it work. We're really not going to be able to go into the level of detail that you would really need. So consider this an introduction to how to master, we'll go into the real gritty stuff in that full other class if you want to search around for that. Okay? Cool. Next, let's get set up. 35. Mastering Setup: Okay, so here is our mixed version of this track. I'm going to set that aside for a second. Go to Live 12 and command N. I'm going to make a totally whoops, totally new session. Okay? You can do this in session view or arrangement view, but I'm going to go to arrangement view. Okay. Now, before I pull in my track, I'm going to do two things. The first is I'm going to pull up my mixer. I'm going to make it nice and big. I really only need one track here, so actually, let's get rid of everything except one audio track. And then let's make our mixer nice and big. Okay, we're not going to need these sens. We really just need our main and maybe this. This track mixer. Either way, we're going to make sure both of those are set right to zero. Okay? Cool. Okay, so that's thing one. Make sure your levels are set to zero. Th two, we are going to turn off our grid. So I'm going to control click somewhere on the timeline. And we have adaptive grid, fixed grid, and we're just going to go to off. Okay? Now, we see these dotted lines. That's going to let me really just get anywhere, not on the grid, wherever I need to be. Okay? Now I'm going to pull in our track, right? I'm going to line it up to the beginning. And I'm going to make sure it's got a little bit of a fade at the beginning, and at the end. Now, you see, it looks like this already has music right from the get go. Let's hear it. Yeah. It's got that bass just starts right away. So what we're going to do is we're going to zoom way in. This tiny fad in we need, it can be a couple of milliseconds. I just don't want to hear a click there. So that little fad that Live did automatically is just fine. Next, I want to make sure that the end is right. Oh, actually, before I do that, I need to do one other thing. Double click on that file and make sure warping is off, right down there. I'm going to turn warping off. We're going to make sure that we're not warping this. Now I'm going to open up the beginning and make sure we're getting all of it there. Let's go to the end. When I turned warping off, it stretched it out. That's fine. I'm going to delete that and then just re open this all the way to make sure we're getting the whole track. Now, I'm just going to look at what's at the end. So it looks like the sound stops here, and then we've got about 2 seconds of silence. Let's hear that. Hmm. Okay. So it just stops. Is that what I want to happen musically? Yeah. Okay. I kind of like it like that. So but what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure there's a little fade anyway. So here we're down to silence. Let's tighten that up a little bit. So I've only got maybe a second of silence at the end here, 57 to 58. There's roughly a second. Then I'm going to make sure we've got a little fade at the end. Okay. Even though we're in silence and fading two silence, we're just going to prevent any kind of clicking or anything weird like that. All right. And that is good. That is our basic setup, okay? Next, let's start doing some maximizing. Okay. 36. EQ for Mastering: Okay. Let's make this thing louder and maybe sounding nicer. So we're going to do more than just making it louder. Another thing we're going to do is make sure that there's nothing frequency wise going crazy. There's no rogue frequencies is going off or whatever. We're happy with the base, we're happy with the high end, the mids, all of that. So we're going to use three tools for this. First is going to be E Q eight Okay. So let's go to an E Q eight and throw that on there. The second is going to be a multi band dynamics, which if you remember, is three compressors in one. And then we're going to throw a glue compressor on the end. Okay? So these are three main tools that we're going to use. Now, I should also say there's kind of two other things you could do here. It is not uncommon to go outside of live for mastering. Even if you're a alive evangelist, a lot of people like using a plug in or multiple plug ins. So what I'm going to try to do here is do it all in live. But when I'm really mastering stuff, don't tell anyone. I'm using one more times than not. So there's a plug in called zone that's designed for mastering, and it's very good. But if you don't want to buy that plug in, you can do it with what's in life, so that's what we're going to do here. So first with our EQ. I'm going to make sure we're only hearing what we know we're hearing. I'm going to turn those two effects off. Now, Let's go out to here. I'm just going to highlight something and loop it. First thing I'm going to do with my EQ. Let's make it nice and big. Let's roll off that bottom end again. Just to be super sure. Right around 20 hertz, 21, that's good. Make sure we're not losing any big base frequencies. And then we're just going to prevent anything from building up down there, any rumbly stuff. Okay. The next thing is, like, kind of to me, the hardest part, really. It really is because it's real aesthetic choices that we got to make here. So, what we're going to do is what's called ringing it out. So I'm going to take just one band of our Q right here. I'm going to just listen. First I'm going to crank up this band, and then I'm just going to kind of scrub. And first, I'm going to listen for any frequencies that just really pop out in doing this. And if there are a problem, then I'm going to invert what I'm doing. And I'm going to go like that, and I'm going to get rid of some of those frequencies. But also, I'm listening for any kind of sweet spots that need a little boost, right? So I'm just saying, like, Oh, I like that. I don't like that, and I'm just applying EQ in subtle ways to bring out things that I think sound nice. So there's not a whole bunch of math to this. This is really kind of just kind of what sounds good. So let's do it for a minute. I don't really hear any problematic frequencies. It kind of looks like there's some stuff up down there stuff fell. I don't really want to cut that. For boosting, I'm looking right in the mid range, right around 500 to ten kin ten K, maybe eight de flex in. Okay. I'm going to give a boot a little boost up here. I kind of like the way that that sounds. Okay. So we're good with the ring it out stage. I could do that all day. I could literally sit here all day. So that's really you got to top. That's our main work with the EQ. We could add more bands if we wanted and see if we can find anything else that's ringing or needs to come out or that we want to boost. Everything is about subtlety here though, if you find yourself doing something like this, you might want to consider going back to your mix, right? Because we would be really changing it a lot. But let's tighten up the queue. If there's something ringing, you might do something like this and just find it down there. Okay. I don't really hear that in this mix, so I think we're good with just that. So let's move on to our multi band dynamics. Okay. 37. Dynamics Processing: Okay. Next, it's time to get over to our multiband dynamics. Now this is where we're going to try to get more loudness out of this thing. I'm going to turn it on. I'm going to leave my glue compressor off, and I'll leave my EQ on. So first, if you remember what this effect is, basically, we have three different compressors separated by an Q. So we've got high mids and lows and compression that we can do on each of them, right? So let's set up our high and low threshold. Let's get rid of our Q for a second. And we can solo each band. Let's listen for the highs. What we're listening here for is something that we can use as the center point and the snare is pretty good for that. What I mostly want to hear in the highs are all the shimmery stuff, distortions, things like that, not too much musical material and not too much of that snare. We can go up a little bit higher. Stand one away on me. There we go. All right. That's okay. It's Ted high. But let's go down to the lows. What we really want to hear here is the rumble. Again, not too much of the snare, but from the other direction. That's pretty good. Let's go with that. Next, let's add a little bit of compression. Let's go here. Let's go back and solo the highs. Just look at the highs. Our main threshold is going to be here. So we're going to go down until we're doing some work here. Now, what's happening here is each of these vertical lines is ten D that it can go up. If we click in the middle of this bar and then drag down, and do something like this. Now, each of those lines within that bar is also ten dB. Ten dB is now becoming a lot smaller inside the top of that threshold. It is a really weird way to look at compression. It's different than any other way in any other compressor, and to be totally honest, it really is confusing to me. This doesn't gel with my brain chemistry all that well. But that's happening. All right next, let's go to the base. And we'll do basically the same thing. We're just going to go down until we're right getting in the business of that sound. And then we're going to just kind of crank it a little bit. Base, always, I usually use a little less compression than anywhere else. So I'm a little bit lighter in the base. Okay, so let's maybe lighten that up, a bit. And then we'll do the same thing to the mis up there. That's where I think a lot of our action is. There's not a lot of motion right now. But you can see the little yellow tick is showing us the kind of amount of our compression up there. Okay. Now, I'm going to go out of solo mode, and then we need to balance these three things. So we have an output volume here. Okay? So we're going to kind of crank that a little bit to get our mixed back sounding good. The base is kind of good right there. Okay. So we're going to kind of delicately balance those things and make sure they are blending just the way we want. All right? Then we're going to go to one layer of compression with our glue compressor. Okay. 38. Final Compression and Limiting: All right. Time to turn on this glue compressor. Now, this glue compressor does two things for us. It does another layer of compression, which we're going to use a little bit. But then it's also a limter. So remember, what a limitor does is it says, This is the ceiling. No volume is going to go higher than that. Okay? And it's default built in ceiling is negative 0.5, pretty hot. But Um, that's okay. We'll get to that when we get to that. So here's what we're going to do here. First, we want our attack and release for master ring to be pretty fast. So let's just go there and there. I like the release just to be all the way as fast as it'll go. Ratio, we're going to leave. Now, threshold, we're going to pull down just so that we're getting a tiny bit of compression here. There we go. Not a lot. We want this glast compressor, just to be grabbing anything that's just popping out. An weird jumps. Okay. Cool. Now for the limter. We're going to turn on the soft clip, and we want to send signal up into that and be hitting that ceiling just barely. Okay? And we're going to do that with makeup gain. Okay? Now, heads up. This is going to get loud. When you do this, everything's going to start to get really loud, so you might turn down your volume or do whatever you need to do. And as you're listening to this, if you have headphones on right now, this is going to get loud. So just heads up. Keep your hand on your volume knob for the next minute. Here we go. So I'm going to push makeup gain until it hits that clip, and we see that light just a ten tiny bit. There it is. All right. Perfect. Okay, but we're not done yet. So we need our final master to be right around negative four DB. That's kind of the sweet spot. That's what a lot of the streaming services require, although the requirements for volume are a moving target sometimes. But right now, I think it's negative four. So, what we're going to do is or what we've done already is because of the ceiling in our limiter, where nothing's going to pop out and go over negative 0.5. That's fine. That's great. But what we need to do now is get our RMS up there. So remember that RMS is an averaging value, right? So if we look at our signal, the thing that's popping up at the top, those are our peaks. The sticker line that's moving up and down, that's our RMS value. So we need to get that RMS value pretty close to our peaks and then have it sit right around negative four. Our peaks are going to go up to negative 0.5, okay? So we need to push up our RMS. And the way we're going to do that is with this makeup game. We can push that sucker all we want. We can push it all the way to the top. We're not going to clip because that soft clip limiter isn't going to let us. It's not going to let anything go past negative 0.5. So we got a little bit more to go. So let's see where we are right now. Okay. So we're actually, we're pretty close. Okay, so we're looking at the green bell. Right? And we're we're sitting around negative seven, maybe negative eight. So we're going to push this to get those up to negative four. Pretty great. So now we are loud. We are nice and loud. All right, so that puts us right where we want to be. Next, I want to talk about a few more things with mastering, but that is essentially a master. That is a pretty decent master. Let's talk about inline mastering audio effect rocks. 39. Final Steps: Okay, first, let's talk about what we do once we're done. We're going to bounce it again. So we're going to go to our export settings. Turn on MP three, if you want. The rest of these settings should be right on. Make sure your start and length are correct. Wave power one. Everything else should be the same. So we should be good there. Okay. So earlier, I said there's a few different things we could do, and I said, in some cases, I might use zone and the majority of real world cases, I might use zone for this because it's so good at it. But there's another thing we could do also, and that is to look at our audio effect racks. If we go to audio effect Rs and look at some of these presets, there are a good number of mastering ones. Um, full chain Master, medialog master, over driven tape, parallel punch punchy dance, you know, a bunch more. Let's take a look at one of these. Let's do this. Let's turn, let's see. Media analog. How about that? Let's put a media analog master on it. Okay? Now, I'm going to turn my mastering off and just here theirs. Okay. It's pretty good. Here's mine. Mine is a lot louder. But maybe this one isn't dialed in quite yet. I mean, we could push it a lot. I had them both on, didn't I? Okay. So here's mine. Okay. Now let's turn mine off. And here's theirs. Yeah, definitely basi, much, much basier. But we could adjust that. I mean, we could go into, into the settings and adjust what it's doing. We could totally do that. So don't forget about those audio effect racks. They're really handy. All right. One more thing I want to tell you about, and that is called inline Mastering. Let's go to one more video on this topic, and then we'll be done. Okay. 40. In-line Mastering: Okay. Now, there is a new I don't know if I'd call it a trend. This is something I'm seeing some people do. I have one producer friends who swears by this. And that is to do inline mastering. Here's what that means. Let's take our master that we made. Let's get rid of this. So just our master, I'm going to turn it back on. I want to save this. So I'm going to put it into a group, command G, and then let's click on the little disc and it looks like I've already done this, but let's call it J's Mastering two. Okay. Now, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go back to the session. The mix session. And I'm going to master right in this session. I'm going to go to my main track. I'm going to throw J mastering two on it or whatever mastering you want. The idea here is that you're mastering right on your main track and you're not bouncing out to stereo and then mastering it. You're skipping a step. A lot of people are finding this to be really useful, especially if you got to work fast. This is to sound pretty good. The advantage here is that in the mastering process, if you find something that you're not happy with in the mix, you can just fix it. You don't have to go all the way back, fix it in the session, bounce it, and then start over again, right? So it can be valuable for that. It can be a harder to mix because there's just because there's more to keep track of or sorry, harder to master, because there's more to keep track of. I haven't done a lot of this. I do mind the old fashioned way, but it is a trend that some people are doing. I think it's pretty cool. I hope it catches on. I'm probably going to start doing it in some upcoming projects. So inline mastering. Now you know. Okay. 41. What Next?: All right. We have reached the end. I have a few more things for you. So first, what comes next? There is a Part seven to this giant series of classes. So in Part seven, we are going to focus on exclusively on Max for Live. This is one of my favorite things. This is one of my all time favorite things. I love playing around with Max for Live. And the only thing I love more than that is teaching Max forive. I love it. I'm really excited to dive into this. So we've almost completely skipped over the real guts of Max for ive because it is its own animal, really. If you're not familiar, Max for Live is basically a programming language that lives with inside Ableton, and it lets you design and build your own effects synth instruments, midi effects, audio effects, things like that. You can do some really wild stuff. I've been using Max longer than I've been using Ableton. So I know this. It's kind of my bread and butter. Let me show you what it looks like. Here's just kind of a max device. You can click on this little button to open it up, and this is the real power of Max for ive. I can open this device and I can say, this device is really cool. But you know it would be cooler is if I could reprogram it to do what I want. Now I can. This is what the code looks like. There are more windows, things like this. I might say, I really like this, but instead of plus one, I want that to be 20 plus Pi or plus the current humidity in Tokyo. I can do those things. Um, So it's really fun. It looks daunting and scary, but trust me. You can learn this. I did. So I'm sure you can. We can build instruments. You know, we can say, I like this, but I want it over here, or I want this value to be something different. It's so much fun. Anyway, Part seven, Max for Live. It's probably out now. Please check it out. It's going to be super fun. We're going to build a bunch of stuff, and I'm going to give you a bunch of code. Okay. Let's move on to one more thing. Okay. 42. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my e mail list here. And if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also, check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.