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Any trance pros mixdown in Ableton? (pg. 3)
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| Kismet7 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lolo
ok I'll remain serious this time.
I happen to do entire mixdowns into Live 8.
Live 8 works extremely well on minimal (not the genre!!) stuff with its own plugins because you don't have to think about headroom. The summing is therefore not affected at all, well, most of the time.
What happens then when mixing 30+ stereo tracks? It sounds like the summing, so the process that send all your audio routing to Out 1-2/Master, is having hard times. It sounds a little bit blurred
I tried changing the warp (warp must stay on unfortunately to prevent timing issues, big big flaw in Live for me), more latency, less track gain everywhere. No help.
Important to mention that many other sequencers nowadays have the same problem. Logic 9 included.
Well, it's coming from the loss of punch of real-time features such as time stretching and pitch shifting, that greatly affect the transients. When rendering a sum of channels using those features, especially offline (which is what everyone does, including me) well the mix gets blurred easily. Of course I can easily blame Live's plugins also, especially the eq and comp devices. Not that they suck, but of course they won't help fixing.
There are a few workarounds:
1°) Systematically render all of your tracks, and/or freeze/flatten them, THEN consolidate them again. This way your cpu doesn't have to deal with internal 32 bit to 16 bit conversion and the resulting file is 16 or 24 bit depending on your audio settings. I mean everything. Instruments, audio tracks and co, that make use of plug-ins. If you have sidechain on some channels, move those plugins to a free channel, freeze-flatten, consolidate, and put the sidechain plugins (gate, filter, compressor) on top of that. Or record in realtime using Live's routing features.
2°) Don't leave time-stretched or pitch-shifted audio clips at different tempi into your arrangement, CONSOLIDATE again and again and again.
3°) If possible use other eq's and compressors than Live's. PSP, Nomad Factory, whatever. Unless this is exactly the kind of sound you want and/or ou have no other choice. I suggest then that you freeze flatten those too!
4°) Don't use audio channels for your transient dependent drums such as kick/snare and co. Use Simpler/Sampler/Drum Rack instead.
5°) If you want to compress heavily on drums for example. Take the comp, group it (ctrl or apple-g), add a second chain in the chain mixer of your group, mix the heavily compressed signal with the uncompressed signal. That's called parallel compression
That explains why Logic up to 8 doesn't have this problem.
1) No time stretching on the fly.
2) Better internal plug-ins for compression and eq. Even in Express.
Logic 9 features Flextime. Good one, but again it'll affect the transients! So use it, and then render the resulting sound.
If you follow those few rules, no single sequencer will dictate the way your stuff sounds. |
To improve workflow, for summing why not just get an analogue mixer or dedicated summing mixer, would that not save the individual channel transients and overall blurry mixes done on Ableton? Also allow you to submix groups to give more seperation.
And can you define consolidate, are you talking about bouncing submixes? |
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| kitphillips |
| quote: | Originally posted by cryophonik
I definitely don't qualify as a "trance pro" and I only recently started using Live 8 a few months ago, but my biggest complaint about it for mixing is the lack of a dedicated console view. That's not really meant to be a knock against Live, because there's no denying that it does what it does better than anything else on the market and is not really designed to be a mixing environment, but I'm just used to a different mixing workflow after using hardware consoles and Sonar and Cubase for so long. Live just isn't as flexible, has pretty poor bussing capabilities, etc. compared to a "proper" console. |
I can't fault the bussing, but I'd love a dedicated EQ for each channel ala sonar. It would just need to be a button that could be turned on and off along with the delay box, mixer,sends returns, etc.
Would really improve Live IMO both for studio and live use.
Laurent, I really don't understand exactly what you mean by these summing problems here? You're talking about headroom on the master mix, but then also talking about bit rate conversion problems in live..? I thought summing was related to the master channel, but bit rate was done during rendering?
I don't have that much technical knowledge, but it seems to me that (warping notwithstanding) live will produce a very similar result to Logic or Cubase if its given the same input. Its sample rate conversion might be the only problem, but assuming you export at 32 bits, and use a seperate utility to convert down, there should be no difference. Even if you do use its sample rate conversion, the differences are likely to be sub 95 dB if I remember right, so pretty inaudible...
I just find it really wierd that people look at two completely different tracks and say, well this one was produced in live and sounds worse, therefore live is inferior:wtf: |
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| Nightshift |
| quote: | Originally posted by kitphillips
I don't have that much technical knowledge, but it seems to me that (warping notwithstanding) live will produce a very similar result to Logic or Cubase if its given the same input. Its sample rate conversion might be the only problem, but assuming you export at 32 bits, and use a seperate utility to convert down, there should be no difference. Even if you do use its sample rate conversion, the differences are likely to be sub 95 dB if I remember right, so pretty inaudible...
I just find it really wierd that people look at two completely different tracks and say, well this one was produced in live and sounds worse, therefore live is inferior:wtf: |
+1 this was my exact point.
also to said thrillseekers remix earlier it really just sounds like very good EQ use, Reverb use, and stereo techniques to give it that very dimensional feeling. The track as a whole has alot of presence/high end, and is not that thick in sound, its actually rather thin.
Sied van Riel and Leon Boiler also both use Cubase and their tracks dont sound nearly as dimensional as this, so that tells me that Thrill really knows how to work his sound to get that dimensional feel and that it does not pertain to the DAW being used.
-my 2cents
Reference track: Chicane - Poppiholla (Thrillseekers Remix)
Counter-Reference track: Sied van Riel and Geert Huinink - Sunrise (Original Mix) |
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| mfitterer1 |
I'd agree with Lolo on flattening and consolidating everything in Live. ESPECIALLY on anything audio. I never have on my midi tracks before but i'm going to try that tomorrow when I sit down in the studio; I know with audio it can affect things noticeably.
I'll report back here when I see what doing it on the midi channels does; if any.. |
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| evo8 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Beatflux
I think I've read too many arguments and flame wars that go back and forth to form a warn out circle that it's all old hat for me. Most people every DAW is the same. Some people think that there are differences,but skill can make up for them. Some people think each DAW has it's own unique sound. Some people think that musical ideas are more important and that the sound quality of a DAW is a minor thing.
I have been A/Bing Chicane - Poppiholla(Thrillseekers Remix) with Airbase - Back(Original Mix) and there is a pretty big difference. The former being mixed down in Cubase and the latter Ableton, there's a big difference in spacial quality. The Airbase mix sounds much flatter, while the Thrill mix has a darker background and every sound seems to pop out more.
If you have a really good example of a clear and 3D mix from Ableton, I would like to hear it. |
me are you serious???
Your putting down the difference in those 2 tracks to the fact that they were produced in different sequencers??? |
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| evo8 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lolo
ok I'll remain serious this time.
I happen to do entire mixdowns into Live 8.
Live 8 works extremely well on minimal (not the genre!!) stuff with its own plugins because you don't have to think about headroom. The summing is therefore not affected at all, well, most of the time.
What happens then when mixing 30+ stereo tracks? It sounds like the summing, so the process that send all your audio routing to Out 1-2/Master, is having hard times. It sounds a little bit blurred
I tried changing the warp (warp must stay on unfortunately to prevent timing issues, big big flaw in Live for me), more latency, less track gain everywhere. No help.
Important to mention that many other sequencers nowadays have the same problem. Logic 9 included.
Well, it's coming from the loss of punch of real-time features such as time stretching and pitch shifting, that greatly affect the transients. When rendering a sum of channels using those features, especially offline (which is what everyone does, including me) well the mix gets blurred easily. Of course I can easily blame Live's plugins also, especially the eq and comp devices. Not that they suck, but of course they won't help fixing.
There are a few workarounds:
1°) Systematically render all of your tracks, and/or freeze/flatten them, THEN consolidate them again. This way your cpu doesn't have to deal with internal 32 bit to 16 bit conversion and the resulting file is 16 or 24 bit depending on your audio settings. I mean everything. Instruments, audio tracks and co, that make use of plug-ins. If you have sidechain on some channels, move those plugins to a free channel, freeze-flatten, consolidate, and put the sidechain plugins (gate, filter, compressor) on top of that. Or record in realtime using Live's routing features.
2°) Don't leave time-stretched or pitch-shifted audio clips at different tempi into your arrangement, CONSOLIDATE again and again and again.
3°) If possible use other eq's and compressors than Live's. PSP, Nomad Factory, whatever. Unless this is exactly the kind of sound you want and/or ou have no other choice. I suggest then that you freeze flatten those too!
4°) Don't use audio channels for your transient dependent drums such as kick/snare and co. Use Simpler/Sampler/Drum Rack instead.
5°) If you want to compress heavily on drums for example. Take the comp, group it (ctrl or apple-g), add a second chain in the chain mixer of your group, mix the heavily compressed signal with the uncompressed signal. That's called parallel compression
That explains why Logic up to 8 doesn't have this problem.
1) No time stretching on the fly.
2) Better internal plug-ins for compression and eq. Even in Express.
Logic 9 features Flextime. Good one, but again it'll affect the transients! So use it, and then render the resulting sound.
If you follow those few rules, no single sequencer will dictate the way your stuff sounds. |
Sorry mate but your gonna have to explain this "blurring" in a bit more detail, ive never heard anyone else complain about this before
In your case you seem to be dealing almost completely with audio tracks and warping, or else your are bouncing all of your instrument tracks, why? To avoid this "summing problem" |
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| Lolo |
| quote: | Originally posted by kitphillips
I can't fault the bussing, but I'd love a dedicated EQ for each channel ala sonar. It would just need to be a button that could be turned on and off along with the delay box, mixer,sends returns, etc.
Would really improve Live IMO both for studio and live use.
Laurent, I really don't understand exactly what you mean by these summing problems here? You're talking about headroom on the master mix, but then also talking about bit rate conversion problems in live..? I thought summing was related to the master channel, but bit rate was done during rendering?
I don't have that much technical knowledge, but it seems to me that (warping notwithstanding) live will produce a very similar result to Logic or Cubase if its given the same input. Its sample rate conversion might be the only problem, but assuming you export at 32 bits, and use a seperate utility to convert down, there should be no difference. Even if you do use its sample rate conversion, the differences are likely to be sub 95 dB if I remember right, so pretty inaudible...
I just find it really wierd that people look at two completely different tracks and say, well this one was produced in live and sounds worse, therefore live is inferior:wtf: |
Well, I found that rendered files in general gave me a blurred sound. It took me some time to investigate, but believe me or not, that's the sum of all warped files, it kinda drains the cpu when rendering, especially when you're summing several 32 bit flattened clips. When I took the time to consolidate all flattened bits and make sure nothing was timestretched into my arrangement, it all got a lot better. Or was it just a feeling?
Same goes for drums. That's a dumb trick, but I tend to put them on a sampler channel instead. If it were me, I'd even put everything on simplers and samplers. It reminds me of the way we used to work back in the Akai days.
I think this elastic audio thing on every DAW now, is killing the transients. Live is pretty ridiculous on that point, because when you disable warp, you can't slice and dice with your audio safely, the timing ain't spot on, even though I DO know that my audio file's timing IS. So I have to leave this on permanently.
I'm coming from the hard days of manual edits, with timestretch used only on the tails of the events, to preserve transients. You said obsessed? Most probably! |
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| DjStephenWiley |
What about the old school mastering house process as a good guide for mixing down?
Instead of rendering the entire track as one, render each audio track on its own, then sum them up inside a different program/sequencer for the final mix down. If you're really good with engineering, this would also allow you to knock out the mastering process if you so chose. |
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| Matsun |
Airwave used to use it.. And Mat Zo makes really crazy music on it :)
Sorry, I'm to lazy to read all posts :) |
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| Lolo |
| quote: | Originally posted by Matsun
Airwave used to use it.. |
He still does! |
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| evo8 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lolo
Well, I found that rendered files in general gave me a blurred sound. It took me some time to investigate, but believe me or not, that's the sum of all warped files, it kinda drains the cpu when rendering, especially when you're summing several 32 bit flattened clips. When I took the time to consolidate all flattened bits and make sure nothing was timestretched into my arrangement, it all got a lot better. Or was it just a feeling?
Same goes for drums. That's a dumb trick, but I tend to put them on a sampler channel instead. If it were me, I'd even put everything on simplers and samplers. It reminds me of the way we used to work back in the Akai days.
I think this elastic audio thing on every DAW now, is killing the transients. Live is pretty ridiculous on that point, because when you disable warp, you can't slice and dice with your audio safely, the timing ain't spot on, even though I DO know that my audio file's timing IS. So I have to leave this on permanently.
I'm coming from the hard days of manual edits, with timestretch used only on the tails of the events, to preserve transients. You said obsessed? Most probably! |
Ok now i see. I think your right in that the Warp on beats mode is very noticeable, add a few other tracks into the mix and yeah it could get messy
I take it that youre talking about loops at different BPM to the project file BPM right?
Ableton claimed big improvements with the new "elastique" or whatever version in Live 8, havent had a chance to test it out myself, has it improved things in your opinion? |
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