finishing a track in ableton (and other daws)

DjCartel

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Yo, so my question is....

When you guys have finished your tracls, do you just send everything to the master channel and add your effects and shit o that, tgen export the file as audio. Or.... Do you make stems for bass atmos fx drums etc and process them individually? Or do you do both. At current i just route my buses to the master and export. Im finding my tracks lack volune by doing this.. Should i "resample" my master as an audio file.and then work on it?

So basically what im asking is what does your finished project look like? Cheers for any help
 
Well ideally you want to get everything to a good volume before exporting, both of those methods work fine
 
I can get everything in the greeb. But then its really quiet. So i giess what im asking is how to i have my audio file to make it louder? Just routed to the master or exported as wav?
 
There are lot's of things you need to do. First, you should bus things together. Drums Bus, Bass Bus, FX Bus etc etc. Each bus should have processing on to make all the sounds fit together, as well as each individual channel properly eq'd.

Then have them all going to the master, where you have more processing like limiting. You really need to squash and limit the hell out of stuff to get it really loud, but the skill is doing that without ruining the sound and losing all the transients.

You should only have a few FX on the master channel. Most processing should be done on the individual channels and the bus channels.

Even then, it won't just magically be loud. Loudness comes from many different things.
 
Sounds like some sort of compression is what you're after, which you would put on the master
 
I think with stuff like this there is no right way but i read somewhere that it can be a really good idea to bounce out all your buses (along as everything ends up thru one) and then put those wavs back in a fresh project and do some more processing. I think this could be a really way easy to add subtle automation of say a bit of flange, phaser and filtering etc to individual buses to add a bit of extra flare.

Problem with this is tho you need to make sure you're completely happy with the mixdown or it could be a complete waste of time lol!
 
I think with stuff like this there is no right way but i read somewhere that it can be a really good idea to bounce out all your buses (along as everything ends up thru one) and then put those wavs back in a fresh project and do some more processing. I think this could be a really way easy to add subtle automation of say a bit of flange, phaser and filtering etc to individual buses to add a bit of extra flare.

Problem with this is tho you need to make sure you're completely happy with the mixdown or it could be a complete waste of time lol!

this is my problem, im forever changing little bits here and there. i did read that its good to bounce audio to stop people adding or removing bits, as it could be an overkill. when i watch tutorials, such as the lsb one, he has all his busses recorded as audio files. but the i dont know if he plays with the master as an input oposed to a bounced audio file. I know mastering is a massive skill to learn, but when you send stuff off i assume you send an audio file, and then they make it loud sounding. so i guess thats a way to do it? think ive got a lot of reading to do!
 
Yeh this is thing that people seem to get confused a lot about. I personally never put anything on my master except a visual eq, mono maker @ 240hz, and a stereo imaging meter like the Logic goniometer. If we do a cheeky bounce to play out then i just use a bit of Ozone and the Oxford Limiter - But for mastering its all about getting the mix as loud as possible (generally) with -3db headroom, then the engineers do the rest using a wav, nothing else. and tbh its not even worth learning imo, time spent on learning mixdowns to the nth is a lot more useful.
 
ok nice one russia. will work the mixdown a bit more see if i can get some power from that. cheers for the help guys
 
Yeh man its a lot to do with perceived loudness, compression and saturation. I put sonimous Satson on every channel now, along with the SSL Comp just to get as much out of every sound before going cray on it!

and its RussLa lol.. guna have to CAPS my name i think!
 
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