Beginner’s Guide to Mastering with Ableton Live

Adam Pollard aka Multiplier, delivers a mastering video tutorial series designed for the beginner, covering the important topics needed to master your music in Ableton Live! Learn the basic principles and terminologies, as well as specific steps to take to get great sounding master files that you can publish to the world.

Videos

• Introduction (00:50) - Adam welcomes you to the course and gives a preview of what he will be covering.

• What is Mastering? (02:42) - Mastering is all about taking your completed song, and creating the best possible audio file to distribute to the world.

• Limiting / Maximization (03:51) - Discover the most important part of mastering. Limiting maximizes the size of the waveform, within the fixed size of the audio file we're creating.

• How to Set the Limiter (09:26) - Learn how to set the amount of limiting with a simple technique, but there are some important limiting artifacts to learn first.

• How Loud? & How to Measure Loudness (05:22) - How loud should you make your track and why? Adam also shows you how to measure loudness.

• How to Change Loudness (01:59) - Now that you've measured loudness and know what to aim for, see how you would actually change loudness for the better.

• Sub Bass Level (02:28) - Explore how to check and set sub bass levels correctly so they have impact and fullness in your mix.

• EQ / Tonal Balance (03:29) - See why it's all about CHECKING the EQ / tonal balance of your mix.

• Kicks & Setting Levels (04:45) - Setting levels is easy once you know how a track SHOULD look. Learn how to do so, and also why it's safer to set kick level slightly higher than you think.

• Mastering as a Separate Step (01:56) - Discover why you should do mastering as a separate step/process, such as mastering a single audio track, and not in your original song project.

• Export Options & File Types (06:58) - Now explore export options, including file types, sample rate, bit depth, dither, and render selection.

• Headroom for MP3 Conversion (03:17) - What is headroom? and then, how and why you need to leave headroom on your final master.

• MP3 Export Length Bug (01:59) - See why you need to be careful with the selection length when exporting to MP3.

• Metadata (00:45) - Now learn what "?metadata" is, and how you can't add it directly using Ableton Live.

• Mono Sub Bass (03:41) - Should you make your sub bass, the lowest frequencies, mono? And if so, how? Also see why this DOESN'T fix any fundamental phase problems.

• DC Offset (01:39) - Explore what this is, and why it might be a problem, and then how to remove it.

• Level Meters (02:15) - Learn when it is OK and not OK to go "into the red".

• Mixing vs Mastering (01:52) - See why we haven't discussed things like "multiband compression" and "mid-side EQ" yet.

• How to Look at Mastering Chains / Racks (01:55) - Have a look at why mastering chains / racks should be "descriptive", not "prescriptive".

• It's OK to Break the Rules (01:10) - Yes... providing it serves a creative purpose!