Ableton Live Mixing Lesson 1

STEP ONE IS PROBLEM-SOLVING.

Welcome to the first Lesson in Make Space For Bass.

If you're having trouble making clean mixes that drop deep, heavy bass, the place to begin is with Gain Staging.

Gain Staging simply means measuring and adjusting the level of every sound in your mix, to keep them loud and clear.

And now you can learn it in this revolutionary hands-on course where you learn by doing activities inside Live.

CLEAN UP YOUR SOUNDS BEFORE YOU MIX

This is the most critical step in mixing, before you do anything else.

It's like making a salad -- before you can slice the veggies, you need to wash them, peel them, and cut off the ugly bits.

That's what we do in the first lesson, to fix problems with the Dynamics and Tone of each sound, so we can bring them up loud and clear in the mix.

But instead of a potato peeler and a knife, we're going to use our audio engineering tools like EQ and Compression.

And you'll get some really handy Ableton Racks to keep and use in all your future mix Projects.

If you ignore this part, you end up with a muddy, crowded mix where the sounds are fighting against each other.

But when you practice effective Gain Staging, you get big, clean mixes with a wide, spacious feel.

Come on in and learn how to prep your sounds for a tight, solid mix.

This is the #1 skill you can develop to make your mixes sound Pro.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

We're going to mix a 16-channel house track at 122bpm.

Every channel has a sound with problems we're going to fix, by using the standard audio engineering tools like Compression, EQ, Gate and Limiter.

You'll learn to clean up every sound so it's loud and clear in the mix.

• We start with key concepts like gain staging, signal-to-noise ratio, headroom, distortion, and clipping.
• You'll learn to use your Peak Level meters in a new way, including those little green ones in between the plugins.
• You'll learn how to know when a sound needs Compression.
• You'll find out how to solve problems in the mix using Utility, Gate, Compressor, EQ, AutoFilter and Limiter.
• We'll work with common electronic sounds including kick drum, sub-bass, beat loops, hihats, synth pads and leads.
• And you'll learn how to set the foundation for bottom-up mixing, which we do in Lesson Two.
• At the end of this lesson you will hear a DRAMATIC improvement in the mix, simply from doing basic cleanup on each sound.