Ableton Live

[Geissler]

It's only a losing war if you're clipping. What if the vocal track is already consistent in volume?

[Cailyn]

In most cases, compression will certainly help, and is often needed, but learning to mix in Live is equally important. There are two ways. One, mentioned above, is to go to Session view (which looks like a mixing board) or two, you can mix in the Arrangement view. The mixing column needs to be enabled (small M at lower right) and then adjust the value below the track number. I mix exclusively in this view now.

To add a compressor, open the browser on the upper left, go to Audio Effects and pull a compressor into the vocal track. Use RMS and set attack aoa .5ms, release 20-40ms, ratio 2-3, threshold -6 to -8. These are starting values, you have to adjust to get the sound you want.

[Geissler]

Cailyn, thanks for the tip on enabling the mixing column in arrangement view, I didn't know about that one.

There are a few other ways to adjust volume in live (that I know of). First, if a single clip is generally too quiet, click on it (and hit shift+tab if you're seeing the effects rack) and raise the clip volume. This is useful because you'll be able to see the waveform more clearly. Another way uses the mixer, but this time by drawing envelopes. Go into arrangement view and make sure the envelope is showing "mixer - track volume" on the right. Then you can either adjust the pink envelope line with your mouse, double clicking to add/remove breakpoints, or automate this by using automation to record envelope changes in real time. Finally, sometimes the option of adjusting the gain on one of your effects can be useful if you want to adjust volume independently of the mixer..

Holy crap, there are a lot of ways of adjusting volume in live!

[patches]

My point was he should try to get a better volume to begin with, instead of just turning the gain up constantly. but the both of you have pretty much covered the bases on how to turn things up in Live.

[Geissler]

haha, rule 1 is definitely to fix it BEFORE the mix

[Jeffreystrader]

Thank you for the tips, I will try these this evening.. Very Cool

[Cailyn]

Good point on the clip volume--I forgot to mention that. Actually, full automation is possible in the clip itself and sometimes this is preferable. I often do minor adjustments to the clip itself, especially if I want to tame notes that are a bit loud relative to the rest. Then when you mix and automate the full track, you don't have to keep adjusting these areas of "micro" automation.