mixing in Ableton - the sound and the fury

old gregg

OK so this has been wrecking my head on and off for over a year now.

I started using Ableton Live 7 over a year ago to deal with live work and am happy enough with things in that regard.

I've also been playing around with using it for composing new music. This is where things are somewhat unpredictable for me. I can create a piece - downtempo/ambient/nothing too demanding in terms of sudden volume changes and it all sounds fine. The level meters don't show any major fluctuations and when I perform the pieces they sound great (sound-quality-wise anyway). However, when I export those same finished pieces out into .wav I find large fluctuations in volume throughout the track. Compression does not seem to make much difference.

The workaround for me recently has been to export out the .wav and open it a wav editor alongside the Ableton set in arrangement view and then tweak volume levels there, export out again, compare, do it again and again until I get something that a resembles a less scary range of volumes. This strikes me as a ludicrous way to deal with volume in a mix. Having come from several years using FL Studio where I could reasonably accurately monitor volume as I worked and even back before then doing a whole album in Cool Edit 2 I never had this problem.

I dunno. Maybe it's a case of doing the creation stuff in Ableton and then exporting out the raw (no reverb, compression, stereo expansion, more cowbell stuff) .wav files and then doing the mixing in something like Pro Tools or whatever just to cut down on the tedium and aleatory way of arriving at an acceptable mix. I'm happy to spend forever on a mix, I just hate to spend time doing stuff that stems from my perception that the software and me are not happy in bed together when it comes to mixing.

What ya reckon and thanks for reading this far?

PaulBrewer

Sounds confusing.

Where do you think the problem is ? Have you looked at the waveform ?

dav nagle

You could awalys speak with an abelton live expert like Barry D and get your answers.

old gregg

Paul: it's when examining the waveform that the huge fluctuations become apparent. Examining the waveform would always have been my first step.

Dave: I've never encountered Barry D?

Funny things is that I'd recently been dealing with this hassle over a mix for a radio station in the UK and then gave up, exported everything out as .wav files, imported back into FL Studio yesterday and had my mix ready to go in about an hour. Infuriating.

I suppose a question is, does anyone produce stuff in Ableton that they turn out ultimately for mastering rather than for playing live and how do they deal with volume levels across a mix in some sort of empirically reproducible way.

seannash

why dont you just solo each channel and bounce it out instead of exporting.

the effects should be on the bounced file

old gregg

mkay, never tried it that way so will rtfm a bit and get a handle on how best to achieve that. Many thanks Sean

jtsuited

seannash wrote: »

why dont you just solo each channel and bounce it out instead of exporting.

the effects should be on the bounced file

you don't need to do that. When you choose 'render to disk' there's a dropdown menu that says 'master' by default at the top of the dialog box. Click on that and select 'all tracks'.

old gregg

cheers jtsuited, I'll try that too.

old gregg

mkay, seems as I asked the question I thought it worthwhile posting how it all worked out based on the feedback I'd received just in case anyone else ever faces a similar dilema ....

So, in the end I tried a sort of combination of what Sean and jtsuited had suggested. I bounced out all the individual tracks (22 of them) and then worked on each of these in a .wav editor just to iron out any glaring volume inconsistencies.

When that was completed I created a new Ableton project and imported each of the wav files into session view as individual tracks. I created an overall Bounce audio track and fed the output of each of the 22 audio tracks into that.
I could now use the volume sliders on each of these to arrive at an approximate setting that woudl give me a nice overall mix.

After a bunch of dry runs through I just recorded into the Bounce track the results of my 22 audio tracks while fine tuning the levels while recording to allow for fade ins and outs and what iffs on the fly.

The result? Exactly what I'd been hoping for all along and very little need for compression at the end.

I'm sure there are even faster/easier ways I could have achieved the end result, particularly after importing the 22 tracks but I've now been able to arrive at a system for generating a mix in Ableton that I have some control over. Perhaps it's still the case that I'd be better taking those 22 tracks and importing the .wav files into a proper mixing environment but for now it's going to be more than satisfactory.

Many thanks again to all who took time out to read the thread and extra thanks to those who replied and put this poor little puppy out of his misery.

Bonus Q for 5 points ... no googling ... where does the expression 'the sound and the fury' come from?

jtsuited

do you mean where did Faulkner get that name for the book from?

woodsdenis

jtsuited wrote: »

do you mean where did Faulkner get that name for the book from?

You googled it admit it musos are that smart:D

beatpoet

You shouldn't need to do all that to get a decent mix in Live. If you export the master you will get exactly what is coming out of the master as a rendered wav. Sounds to me like you're normalising the mix on export. There's not a lot else to go wrong in there.

old gregg

beatpoet wrote: »

You shouldn't need to do all that to get a decent mix in Live. If you export the master you will get exactly what is coming out of the master as a rendered wav. Sounds to me like you're normalising the mix on export. There's not a lot else to go wrong in there.

see, that's what I thought should happen but it's not what was happening. I was deffo not normalising the mix on the way out. I'd normally use the normalise option in any DAW as a last resort so would have made sure it was not creeping in.
But, exporting everything out as individual channels and importing them straight back in as audio files and playing back what was there did give me what I'd hoped would come out of the master and it's a more logical way for me to work anyway so am cool with it. It also allows me to play with each of the channel wavs which is even better.

The only thing I can say that may have been a contributing factor was that most of the tracks I was working on at the time would have been between 10 and 18 mins long .... big sweeping ambient things with large audio field recordings and sometimes 15 - 20 VST synths all belting away. And even though the pooter is equiped to deal with the load maybe Ableton is/was not the best tool for my style of music and was starting to choke during export. At least this way I've now got the type of control back I used to enjoy in previous DAWs so that's cool I reckon.