Mastering in Ableton Live 11 Tutorial

[Music] hey everybody what's up welcome to ableton tips my name is guido i'm over from cats and beats and today we're going to be mastering in ableton 11. now i have ableton 11 in front of me it's looking all nice and sexy the track is called stellenboss it'll be down in the description and this video is going to be set up a little bit different than my usual videos if you know who i am we are going to first do the mastering and then after i'm going to explain why i did certain things to just help you guys out i also only have 20 minutes so let's get started right away now let's get started with the doing first we're going to put a limiter on to the master i'm going to turn that off really fast and do this really quick check make sure that i have head room to begin with i'm pressing play right now and here i can check if i've headroom just press tab to go in between both and i like having this meter here and just dragging it up and it'll say if i have headroom so i have about -5 to be so i have 5 to b ish of headroom if you don't have headroom turn down your groups or turn down your uh your track a little bit okay so we have that next thing i want to do is turn on my limiter i want to set my look ahead time to six milliseconds and set my ceiling to minus one and we're going to turn up the gain until we hear audible distortion now you're probably going to ask what is audible distortion it sounds like this [Music] that's how this is the normal song and this is how the distortion sounds so that's not good so we're going to set this to -1 set this to 6 milliseconds we're going to turn this gain up until we hear that distortion is just a hint of it and then we'll back off 1db [Music] okay so it's it already had this track already has a little bit distortion in it but at around 11 db it started getting a bit nasty so then i just backed off now here is a quick little tip uh because i have this other plugin over here that's not able to necessarily but it is completely free so give that a download it's called ulean loudness meter and here we have two measurements minus 10 and minus 13. and the tip goes as follows if you're putting your limiter up and you can't hit around minus 10 lufs maybe even minus 8 l ufs without getting tons of distortion then most likely you're going to have to go back in your track and figure out what's causing the distortion a limiter is merciless if you have a non-balanced mix the limiter will go because something is way too loud some frequency is just being slammed down by the limiter a limiter basically means that no sound will go up okay i'm explaining the why but let's continue doing this is just a quick tip to begin with that will help you out a lot my main focus is to get this limiter to do to be as clean as possible so the next thing i'm going to do is open up an eq and with this eq i'm going to clean and balance out the master okay so i'm also going to click over here on over sampling and i'm also going to be opening up a utility here another one there pressing command k making a button here number four and number five or ctrl k setting this to mono and setting this to side then i'm going to quickly have a listen to the mid and the sides separately from each other to see if i need to do any cleaning in mid-side mode with the eq so let's first have a little listen to what the mid sound like okay it sounds okay it sounds a little bit out of whack there's not that much of this whole area going on and then in mono mode or in side mode a lot of rumble and there's not much definition normally there isn't not a lot of definition in the side to begin with but there are weird stereo things being used and i'm not really sure about that so we're going to be doing two things to start out with we're going to put this into mid side mode i'm going to immediately start with the side and make sure that the utilities are not turned on i'm going to put my hand on this button over here i'm going to move this up until i feel that the track is losing its warmth you can do this in two ways either move down from the top and make sure that the track sounds warm again or move up my preference will be the other way around also turn off this little button but you really have to use your ears instead and i really suggest not looking at your screen so my screen is down below me but i'm gonna look up over it and then move back [Music] i'm already identifying that that sound is way too loud so i'm going to also find that sound that's just way too loud and turn that down as well it's nice right when you can't see it you can't see it you have to actually use your uh your ears instead okay so we have that kinda settled-ish let's move on to the side and do the same thing with this low end move this up until we find that the track's warm enough again i know of a very steep cut here i'm just gonna take that down normally with a cut like this you can get a little bit extra noise well it doesn't matter post ringing doesn't matter but i'm just going to cut that low end until it sounds tight also i'm going to just put a little bump here [Music] and yeah i'm gonna do that like this actually i'm gonna do that with a bill now just so you know every single song will have a completely different uh eq so don't copy this eq for your own song instead use the utilities and instead use what i did so to go with cutting it go from the top and then bring it back down turn this off try to listen in this mid-side mode while you're doing the mid-side eq'ing over exaggerate the sound to figure out where it is so that you really train your ears and then gently push very loud cues and figure out if the song sounds better like this at the end of the day us cutting away frequencies all this stuff is making this limiter go thank you thank you so much i can be even less crappy and the limiter can now be even more transparent i want a more i want a transparent loud mix like our master so we have those two set up next up i'm going to be using a glue compressor because i kind of like eq compress limit those three i don't want to do too many crazy things that being said though this glue compressor has some tricks up its sleeve that i don't see being used that often so good that you're over here make sure to like subscribe for more of this kind of stuff check this out if we open this glue compressor up we can use this internal side chain and with this internal side chain what we can do is we can actually specify a certain frequency range that this compressor only compresses in that frequency range making sure that the whole sound in that area gets a little bit more tight now when i listen to this song what i notice is there's lots of low end goop going on we already eq'd out quite a lot of goop uh i call it goop because it was just and i want that low end instead of being like the whole time i wanted to go nice and tight okay this look this is what tight means i don't know why but my hands do that when it needs to be tight so a quick tip here is to let the dynamics move up and down according to the fundamental frequency of the kick drum and then the kick drum will indicate that we need to get that low end to go instead of just like that let's find the fundamentals of the kick drum well around 40 hertz uh so we'll go over here 40-ish hertz oh wow that doesn't work 40. there we go i have a tight q so the q is going up means that it's a tighter cue here let me just show you tight q tie q wide cue tight q over there okay so tight q um and now i'm going to set my attack a little bit slower my release a little bit faster and leave my ratio on four to one again at the end of the video explaining all the whys and we're going to slam that a bit yeah okay okay with it on and off we're slowly starting to notice there's a little bit of a difference i'm just going to click number six here and then turn this on and off you're noticing that we're slowly cleaning up that low and kind of balancing both of the things out we don't have any juice just yet so it's not really super sexy but what i'm going to do is i'm going to open up another eq i'm not going to use a magic box here again i really believe in eq compression and you know limiting we're just gonna open up another eq instead of using the makeup gain here because that's kind of what you would normally do you would make a gain the problem um or the the thing that you've lost the gain reduction that you lost you just make up gain it up we're gonna actually use a eq and use this as make up gain now we can rebalance a little bit but in stereo [Music] let's go to a different part of the song where there's a little bit more going on and let's put a little bit of makeup gain via this button over here about 2 db because we lost it here okay cool now i'm going to continue going and i'm going to get another limiter behind this whole limiter situation that we have right now because currently you have a clean balanced sound that is dynamically being controlled in the low end because that was lumpy and weird and then a little bit of makeup gain where we're losing a little bit of presence which is in the 1k area we're going to move up for this and now we can finally use a faster look ahead time we're going to set our ceiling here to zero we're going to set our ceiling here to minus one and i might mess with the release here but we're going to try and push even more eb's up into it so around there again i'm using the same method i'm also going to just quickly undo the auto release when the release is too fast or it's set on auto the auto is going like fast slow slow slow fast fast also depending on what's being put inside of it these auto or intelligent release controls are really there to help you out to make sure that you're going to get in as clear as possible sound you could possibly get with the computer helping you out but i'm going to slow that release down a little bit and let it be steady because then i can have even less distortion okay so now with all these sexy little numbers here we can actually check the before and after there and i've been trying to go as loud as possible right now we're hitting around minus 7.8 minus 7.5 minus 8 around that number pretty darn easy to be honest um we can continue with adding a little bit of clipping or saturation or things like that but for me personally this song was already loud enough and i only have 20 minutes and then now i need to also explain the whys why did i do all these things what does the minus one ceiling do what does the l u of s even mean does the l uff doesn't even matter all that kind of good stuff so welcome to the why part of the video i'm glad you made it congratulations you're already better than the people that just clicked away immediately good job you're staying that means you want to learn all right make sure to like the video if you've gone this far check this out the whys why let's start with the final metering here why do we need to master this as loud as we can without too much audible distortion so a clean nice loud master well we're making the final copy right uh so we're the final bounce and the final bounce or the final exports is gonna go on to soundcloud and bandcamp and beatport those specifically those three don't have something called loudness normalization right so that means that we have to kind of get loud uh if you're going to be put on a playlist on soundcloud for instance and your song is mastered to minus 14 because you heard that somewhere and then it's going to be very very quiet and it's not going to make any sense people will be like oh god damn enough to turn the volume back up and they have to turn the volume back down no just keep it as what the references would be so the reference would be a song that would be before your song or after your song on the radio or on the playlist where dj would play it at and then push it around there generally speaking my philosophy is just get it as loud as you can get it without it being stupid as stupid would be minus three okay so that's kind of the rule of thumb there now we put a ceiling here on minus one because we're also you know when we do upload at the soundcloud beatboarder bank camp we go from a wave form which is beautiful and it's 70 megabytes big and it's a beautiful baby right it's like this beautiful little thing and then we give it the soundcloud and soundcloud decides to just kind of chop its little legs off and it's heads off and just leaves a little hand and be like this is a representation of your baby um in other words goes from 70 megabytes down to about three megabytes in bad cases depending on the bit rate and when that happens the ceiling so the the peak of it you'll get peaks over the zero db line which means that you're going to get extra amounts of clipping digital clipping that's not very nice to listen to now we're also going to be going to spotify and to youtube and to itunes and other other ones that i can't enable the top of my head right now and they would also take it from this beautiful waveform to an mp3 or to a ogg or the apple one which i forgot doesn't really matter but with every single time you'll go from a 70 db down to 7 megabytes 3 megabytes depending on the bandwidth depending on the bit that's the bit rates that gets through okay so -1 is a safe bet spotify says that -2 is a safer bet all right so we have that set up that's the reasoning why now we have these different look-ahead times we have a look-ahead time of 1.5 milliseconds and here we have a look-up at time of six milliseconds why do we have these differences what's the difference between look at times well a look ahead time 1.5 milliseconds allows you to be louder however it will also push in more distortion a look ahead time of six milliseconds let's in through less distortion so the slower the look ahead time the less distortion you're going to have but the less loud you're going to be able to get so my little work around method is to go as loud as you can with the six milliseconds and then once you have a very clean little eq compressor makeup gain set up so that you've cleaned it up and it's nice and balanced and sexy then you put on the next limiter with a 1.5 just to push the last little bits because we have such a clean thing this little 1.5 millisecond limiter is not going to have to work as hard and therefore we're not going to have as much distortion okay moving back down the line we have this uh makeup gain here pretty obvious right you can just balance it out again normally you don't have to do that much just a little bit of a bump here or there we have this glue compressor which is probably going to be more interesting because we have this internal side chain now with this internal side chain we can take this frequency and move it to anything we might find a bit much generally speaking you can use this for low end just to tighten the whole thing up like i've used it here or you can use it for the top end let's just pretend for instance that the person who makes this makes lots of topping in there and it's just hurting your ears and it's like super transient heavy claps and things like that and just sucks ass well what you can then do is take the attack time here take that down take this little bell and move it to where it hurts your ears which most likely will be about 3 000 kilohertz take the release time leave it nice and fast as well and then with this threshold every single time a very harsh clap would come in and this would be the delimiter it'll go like this bang immediate attack that top end transient will be pushed down and it will sound a lot smoother in comparison to just letting it through and there's no compressor so be like black this would be a de-esser setup if you wanted to use it like that now and you would have to have a fast attack with a slow attack or slower attack what we can do is the transient comes through this is the compressor and instead of just slamming it down it'll softly push it down and let it come back up what that means is that we get this beautiful coming through so basically we get this waveform to push on through the whole time and this will then control that whole low end sound area you can use this for any other frequency as well for instance that doof that was in this track i could have specifically set it so that instead of having this q over here this value here that it would only start cutting it down once that beep is in there right but i didn't want to get too complicated and putting a whole bunch of glue compressors now the the positive of a glue compressor with the internal side chain is that it will only do the compression when that kick drum is kicking in when it's not kicking in and it doesn't needs to be you know tight together like the bass is going to do a wobbly thing or whatever then it won't have to it won't do anything so that's the little key where we have the cue tight now clean and balance out the master is over here um yeah follow the rules that i've already set up cut your low end to see if that works for you you do not always have to cut to low and sometimes you can boost the low end you do not always have to cut the low mid sometimes you can boost it as well you just have to find your balance and definitely do that into the limiter because you've already set that up as is and at the end of the day you're going to have a sound that's going to come out of the limiter so it's definitely going to be easier when you do it into the limiter now the last thing is that we need to bounce this track down we're going to bounce it down with an export button over here and we're going to go over here click on on on this part and then it's going to wave 16 bit name of dither power 3. i can't go on on data too much i have a 20 minute limit but dinner basically is just a little bit of noise when you hear that you hear that at the end of a song and actually you won't probably hear it but if you have for instance a reverb till at the end of a song if you don't have dither set up then you're going to have that's called truncation distortion or in other words distortion that's uh it's it's a little bit of a up you just put a little bit of dither in it it'll sound instead that which just success so it's just a you know amateur hour to not do it always dither or just dither just make a t-shirt out of that should be cool all right guys that's it i hope you've enjoyed it make sure to subscribe to this channel it's slowly growing and it's gonna probably be pretty big uh it would be cool to see you all in the comments if you have questions i'll answer it there come over to cat and beats as well uh youtube.comcatbeats obviously and um say hi i have a mixing and mastering channel there where i mix in the box and give little tips and things like that i'll be over here sometimes too thank you very much for watching bye take care have a great day

Channel: Ableton Tips

Views: 20,278

Rating: 4.9824867 out of 5

Keywords: Ableton Live, Ableton Live Tutorial, Ableton, Ableton Tips, ableton tips and tricks, PML, Mastering, Mastering Ableton, Mastering in Ableton Live 11, Mixing Ableton Live 11, Mastering tutorial, How to Mastering in Ableton

Id: qrroYDVdPUc

Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021