The Cut Off is real!
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yeah 6 months in the grand scheme of things is very little time, I didn’t feel “good” at my gear until I had been working with it regularly for about 2 years, and every 6 months that go by I feel like I have another moment of “leveling up” where I’ve learned more and thus do things differently than I was before
it’s this constantly spiraling path that sometimes feels flat, but always moves upwards somehow, lots of fun being a musician 
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Take enough time to learn your music tools to a medium level, as an advanced level will only come with time and lots of practice.
I would also encourage you to limit yourself to the least possible amount of tools, as more than two or three would probably be harder to manage on live environments.
Get a good enough soundcard allowing you to record/mixing your live equipment on a computer or hardware device but also to use as an external mixer live.
Listen to your tracks live or recorded into any DAW and do A/B comparison, using an spectrum analyser, with the type of sound/artist/tracks you would like to sound like. Apply processing and shape it till your production sounds similar to the reference.
Invest on external processors to mimic the ones you use on the DAW and then probably you would sound a bit more closer to the reference, but get ready to spend a lot of money I would say.
I would rather just record your hardware stuff into your preferred DAW, using different tracks for each instrument/sound, and then process and mix it there to your liking, again A/B comparison.
You are always gonna need some pro mastering to end with, but that should be enough to practice for now
Enjoy the ride, it is a long one, and don’t stop having fun with it.
Some good headphones for mixing and an acoustic treated room may also help.
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I am early in my DAWLESS journey but I’m really having a difficult time getting a good mix.
I leaned on Overbridge for my first few tracks and it felt like a performance enhancing drug to be back in Ableton again to mix, EQ, and then heck, while I’m here, this arrangement sure could use some work…
In the end I was making tracks that had diverged enough from the stuff I wrote using my hardware that I’d be hard pressed to play it live. And that’s what I really want to do!
Overbridge also causes you to lose most of your FX unless you laboriously record one track at a time. Which kind of kills the live performance mood even further.
So I’m back to DAWLESS and I mean it this time. But so far I’m completely failing at making a listenable mix.
I decided to use an iOS oscilloscope app to measure the frequency of each track, then attempted to roll off the appropriate highs and lows of each track band pass filter available on the digi-boxes to keep them clean and free of mud. But it feels like the band pass just isn’t as brutally effective as my trust old Ableton EQ8. I’m still hopelessly stuck in the mud. (I would also love suggestions on how to better monitor frequencies, the Blue Mangoo oscilloscope isn’t quite the right visualization. I thought about Filterfab but it’s a little too spendy and I don’t plan to actually use the filters, just the visualizer.)
I wish I had multiple analog outs on these digis, I would love to use a per-channel EQ on a mixer. But as it stands, I have these little digital filters and I’m not sure I can get a good clean mix out of them.
Anyone else stuck on this level of the DAWLESS game?
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You might want to expand on this a bit because it doesn’t sound right. Overbridge allows you to record every individual track and the send FX so you shouldn’t be losing anything. Possible exception is older boxes that have less bandwidth over the older USB port so they can’t do all the tracks at once.
Someone else posted (some time ago) about recording the delay and reverb FX along with each track but that’s not possible due to the signal flow and this was a fundamental misunderstanding. You can’t do that with send FX in software either as all the tracks “sending” into a given effect are getting mixed together like paint that cannot then be separated again.
If I’ve misunderstood then please explain again. I’m sure someone here can help even if it’s not me!
Thanks for clarifying. I actually agree with the spirit of what the other poster said because I always lost my mojo setting up Overbridge and trying to multi-track record.
I note with interest that some of the high profile techno producers here like @AdamJay and @DaveMech often seem to advocate recording their jams as a stereo pair through a relatively basic mastering chain.
The main problem of any inexperienced musician is that he does not always understand how this or that instrument should sound. at one time, the way of listening to each instrument against the background of pink noise helped me a lot to understand this issue. this method is good because it helps to quickly determine the frequency dominants in each instrument.
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Right, sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant that if you want to use Overbridge to multitrack in order to EQ each track separately, you no longer get to make use of the FX send channels.
A relatively simple mastering chain sounds nice. I think I need to think more about mixing and mastering during the sound design process.
The whole concept of live mixing takes time to learn, practice and master.
You can’t get away with nearly as much as you would mixing with a DAW, as there just aren’t the tools available for fixing a mix. This is especially true with anything below a few hundred Hz. If you’re not ducking it, you need to choose between having a subby kick or a subby bassline, because you can’t really have both.
It’s a cliche, but less really is more. If you’ve got more than about 8 tracks running, it’s going to start to get difficult to maintain a good mix. Also, the further I go down the live mixing rabbit hole, the less and less effects I find that I’m using. I use the odd little bit of reverb here and there and a bit of delay on my hats and maybe sometimes my synth, but often very short and chorus like.
Something on the end of the chain can be nice. The Analog Heat is great, because it adds some nice sparkle, and the EQ and filter can be really useful for cutting and bumping frequencies. But something on the master isn’t going to sound good if your mix isn’t already pretty good.
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I recorded the AR with a qupac digital mixer, it sounded a lot cleaner with a bit of eq from the mixer. It allows for different scenes to be set up, for live usage this is what many live bands do. Having a digital mixer is quiete beneficial.
Essentially i learn mixing with my daw, because i can use proQ3 and cross check frequency overlap, and use dynamic eq, with a digital mixer one has to be more rigorous and set fixed frequency bands. To create ebb and flow is much easier in a DAW. I suggest to use Octatrack as stem player, and to do a baseline and additonal percussions with a drum maschine, maybe one hands on synth to play live
Also its a good idea to additionally connect a cheap boom box to your mixer to x reference the mix on end user equipment. Also having a reference track to switch to is good to reset your ears. I.e create as many listening enviroments as possible. (different headphones etc.)
Also there is that fx problem, modern daw poduction uses distortion, delay, phaser etc mostly everywhere, if you have to setup different fx chains on your outboard gear, that alone can get expensive.
Yup! And it’s total bullsheeeeet. I wish OB was better.
would you say this is also true for mixing an hour long live set where each of the (in your example 8 tracks) single elements is theoretically constantly changing every few minutes? what do your 8 tracks consist of for example and what gear do you use in this example? 
this was meant as a reply to @Fin25 last message
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The longest live set I’ve done was 30 minutes, and that was entirely on a polyend tracker.
It’s all about what gear you’re using though I guess.
I tend to have 4-5 tracks for drums, then 2-3 tracks for Synths. Sometimes that’s on one piece of gear, sometimes across 2 or 3 pieces.
My setup for the foreseeable will be Perkons, Polivoks and Octatrack.
Four tracks for Perkons, one for Polivoks, then up to three sample tracks on OT.
Thats about as much as my brain will cope with.
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Especially reverbs… adjusting reverbs with big sound is a nightmare. You get none of the subtleties you face in the studio. Your deep and long blackhole/shimmer/whatever ends up like shit as it gets mixed with the natural reverb of the room.
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Reverb can be such a mix killer! Unless I have some big verbed out sound playing pretty much on its own, I either use a short decay and low send, or I duck it.
It’s so hard to make long reverbs sit in busy mixes without tricks like ducking.
Yeah, I think a lot of people use reverb as a “set & forget” thing, and more often than not that just clutters the mix. If you want a big wet reverb sound, giving it a long tail but then choking it at carefully chosen points can take it from a washed out mess to a tight, complex rhythmic element.
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Ballsy! Did you work within 1 project for the whole set or have to load other projects?
One project, about 15 patterns if I remember rightly.
Yeah I suppose perf mode gives quite a bit of scope to keep things interesting and tempo changes etc, so 1 project makes sense, just never would have thought of trying a longish set on mine. I have not used it for a while but that you did it sparked some interest.
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