Hello, I am working on a few tracks for some projects and am having some trouble with mixing and mastering. My typical setup is using all 8 tracks (no Master), into Ableton Live to record the mix, then master that track in Ableton. In general, most of my tracks are lacking dynamic high and low end, and are slightly distorted sounding – and cannot be made louder with Ableton without losing a ton of quality. Frankly, the mix and master sounds like there’s a blanket over the audio. I have had a few good mixes and masters, and I am unsure what made them sound good! I wonder if my mixes that sound bad have too many tracks playing the same audio frequency and thus muffling the sound. Or maybe there’s just too many tracks playing at the same time – less is more? Any advice or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated! I am not great at mixing or mastering, and I really need to learn how to sculpt my sound in the OT. Thanks for your time!
Hi,
You discribe the symptomes of an excessive use of limiting on a “bad” mixdown. (Please don’t take that bad).
So the first point as you said would be to improve arrangements, because it will be always easier to mix 4 tracks on our limited machine than 8 playing at the same time on each other territory.
After giving each element of your track the right space with the filter and before applying any other dynamic process, you can use the Voxengo Span plugin in Ableton to check your mix spectrum. Any excessive peak should be tamed, high end and low end peak on the same level give a good reference to start with.
The gain staging is really important in the octatrack to avoid distortion in the end, check that each input gain is not set to high in the beginning of the chain. There is a few topics about gain staging on the octatrack on the forum, I let you make your research.
Keep in mind that the output signal of your octatrack should peak at -6 to -3db maximum in ableton in order to perform your mastering properly.
A tip if you are composing without laptop could be to use a recording track on the OT configured to resample the main output and check the color of the leds : keep them orange, avoid the red zone (even if this one seems “tolerant”).
If you are confortable with it, you first could use a compressor in Ableton to catch the peaks (no more than 2db of reduction on your master is a good reference to preserve the punch of the track).
Then you can apply saturation and limitation.
I will try all of this, thanks so much for taking the time to write this!
I’m not the OP, but I like the sound of this trick. I wanted to make sure I understood: do you check the LED colors after playing back the recorded sample?
So basically, let’s say you have sounds on tracks 1 through 7. Then you record all of those on track 8. Then mute everything but 8 and play it, checking the LED colors?
Or did I misunderstand?
Thanks!
Don’t need to record nor play. Just set your recorder with SRC3 = MAIN, it will meter this source.
Orange is safer, but you can reach red, which is a -12db warning imho (tested on MKI).
Use a spare track recorder on the OT to record main. Place a record trig. Set length to 16 steps. Then at any time you can open the track recorder AED and look at the waveform. Gives you a visual idea of whats happening. You can see if anything is clipping, you can see if theres no dynamics, or too much. Very useful.
Do as much as possible in the OT mix.
Then you can run it into ableton for the final spit and polish.
I will start doing this on future projects but these that I’m working on are using all eight tracks for playback. I’ll have to remember this trick though!
It doesnt matter. Recorder tracks are always available, regardless of what playback tracks are doing.
OK good to know