Ableton Live

[mheton]

Also an longtime Ableton Live user (20y).
Just yesterday I was amazed at the depth of the integration of Live 12 and Push3. I checked out the MPE possibilities with the Live VSTs and my Hydrasynth - incredible.

But the integration of C74s Max with Ableton is the reason why I never thought of switching. I just wish I was a little smarter for Max/Rnbo or I had more time.

[Jendrik]

Yesterday I did a thorough comparison of the Glue with the SSL Bus Compressor 2, I honestly can’t hear a difference. I made a Blackhole preset in Hybrid Reverb that does the same thing. I probably got rid of 1/3 of my plugins just because I feel there is so much filtering and EQing built into the Ableton FX that once you learn it, it becomes second nature to get a sound.

[eblomquist]

Any tips you’d like to share?

I’ve recently started using the built in plugins for “mastering” tracks because they sound adequate to my old ears.

[Jendrik]

What I was saying was more for the general things that we all need and can do quite easily with Ableton. Instead of getting the Eventide bundles or SSL for that matter specially if you have Suite. For example, if you want a specific delay that is really unique, like the Raindrops from Sinevibes, I can see the value.

The general Mixbus Compression is fairly straight forward with the Glue Compressor.

I am not good at mastering, I have just started to get better results. I would ask @Gregg or @trickyflemming for advice.

[FailedSitcom]

A heads-up that 12.1 is now out of beta (and Philip Meyer’s MIDI Tools indeed made it into the release).

[toneburst]

@2197

a couple of months ago, i remember finding a new m4l device that would let you control the project tempo to make it a bit more dynamic and “human” like

I think this might be what you were thinking of:

FlexGroove

[OOHH]

Wow re: PM MIDI tools!

[Jendrik]

Seems really slow right now. Autotags i guess.

[alechko]

there’s additional pack with 3 new sequencers, don’t know why it didn’t appear in the Packs tab, it was added to the tab after downloading manually.
from quick testing they are pretty great, the only thing missing for me is ability to sequence parameters of other devices like with Stepic or MDD Snake, nonetheless, pretty welcome addition

Sequencers

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another thing, warning for people who have surface script controllers, 12.1 introduced new Python version which breaks the scripts for those compiled with python2, it broke my Faderfox EC4 script and I’ve seen reports of other devices like Maschine, just fyi.

The embedded Python interpreter has been updated to version 3.11.6. Because of this, remote scripts that use compiled byte code (.pyc) need to be recompiled using this Python version to work properly with Live 12.1.

[Jendrik]

Yeah, Faderfox Universal 2 script is outated. I like updates but i should have waited.

[alechko]

I’ve sent email to Mathias but got no response yet, I hope it’s as easy fix as recompiling the source files but there could be incompatible bits inside, so no idea when it will be fixed.

my Live is set to auto-update, lucky for me I don’t rely on the EC4 in Live that much and I can just quickly map things for now, otherwise I would turn off the auto-update for now to avoid this.

[LLK]

Damn I wonder if this breaks Clyphx again (probably, ugh), that’d suck.

[Voiron27]

I just realized Ableton treats A3 as 440hz instead of standard pitch notation that would be 220hz. I know there isn’t consistency across midi implementations in DAWs but I’m still bothered.

[alechko]

worth checking the script you have, it could be that you have the unpacked version which was compiled by Live, my older FaderFox Universal version (before last firmware update to the EC4) came unpacked so it was possible to modify it.
taking a look inside I can see that the script uses the ableton.v2 module which is basically Python2, the newer one is under ableton.v3, I’m not sure that inherited properties/functions like ableton.v2.control_surface differ from ableton.v3.control_surface so I’m not going to try recompiling myself, but it should be indication if a script uses Python3 or Python2.

[yghartsyrt]

Same here. Sent an email, but got no response. I’m not sure, if I ever got a response from him

[Jendrik]

@OOHH

Wow re: PM MIDI tools!

I was an early adopter of the MIDI tools, and Ableton even included the transformative things I did not buy.

@Voiron27

I just realized Ableton treats A3 as 440hz instead of standard pitch notation that would be 220hz. I know there isn’t consistency across midi implementations in DAWs but I’m still bothered.

It just starts at C0 that’s it.

@yghartsyrt

Same here. Sent an email, but got no response. I’m not sure, if I ever got a response from him

He does, but if we all want a fix right on release day, it’s probably going to be a few hundred emails a day…

[iamsaitam]

That’s actually a very good argument to make in order for middle C (C3) in MIDI to be 60. Unfortunately there’s no consensus and like @Jendrik mentioned, certain developers rather avoid having negative octaves due to MIDI so they choose middle C as C4 (72).

[toneburst]

@iamsaitam

certain developers rather avoid having negative octaves

Ah, I didn’t realise that was why some manufacturers chose C4 as “middle C”. Makes a kind of sense, I guess.

[eblomquist]

Any tips on simple mastering in Live 12?

I’ve got over 40 stereo rehearsal room recordings that just need some level adjustment due to some aggressive drum hits.

Need to tame those and bring up the overall level while not clipping.

I used to use Ozone but that feels like overkill and I’m hoping to just use native Ableton devices.

Thanks!

[praffensperger]

Hey Ed, there are lots of options for basic mastering in Live. I will emphasize “basic” here, since we have professional mastering engineers floating on the forum.

The key thing, in my opinion, is to end with a Limiter instance. Live 12.1 has enhanced the limiter to have a “Maximize” mode, which I assume is in the Wave L1 Maximizer lineage. Don’t turn that one up all the way, though. That’s the path down to the CD loudness war. But Limiter is there, it’s a tool and it will help you achieve a higher perceived loudness while avoiding clipping.

You might also want to compress. For that, my go-to is the Glue compressor. Here are some settings I used for mastering in a recent project:

• auto release
• .3 attack
• ratio 2
• soft clip on
• right-click it to make sure “oversampling” is turned on
• dry/wet @ 47% (ok that’s really 50% with some random error)

You really have to set the threshold based on the level that’s coming into plug-in. For this random project, that was -8.25 dB but there’s no way to know ahead of time what that should be. I suggest that you set the make-up gain such that the effect is approximately loudness-neutral when you bypass (that’s not possible to do 100%, because it’s compressing but you can probably remove extreme level differences). Keep in mind that Glue will do a layer of clipping at its output, and if you have Limiter after Glue, then you can always trade Glue make-up for Limiter input gain which may change the clipping characteristics.

You said you didn’t want clipping, but maybe you can tolerate some saturation, so another thing to experiment with is Glue → Saturator → Limiter. Go gently, say 3dB of Analog Clip. This is another path to “make it loud” while sailing into the wind on quality. But our ears have been culturally acclimatized to a bit of distortion in recordings, and since “optimal quality” is like, totally subjective, then some gentle saturation is likely to be appropriate.

If you’ve got some tonal imbalance going on, then EQ8 that out at the start of the chain.

The next level is compressing the lows and the highs separately, see “Two Band Compressor.adg”, attached.
Two Band Compressor.adg (10.8 KB)