So last night, I started to do a mixdown of a remix that I’m finishing. The first channel that i started working on was one of the kick channels. The channel consisted of a drum rack with a sampled kick and a compressor after the kick.
I enlarged the channel so that I could see where it was peaking. I wanted to get it close to 0db as I could but a bit under, taking into consideration that there was gonna be a bit of summing and I wanted to prevent clipping, so I was making a little headroom.
Anyway, when I adjusted the level, I found that I was clipping the master (yucky!), but not clipping in the channel. I then noticed that I was clipping after the compressor, but I was fine before it. The main issue here is that the volume on the channel was the readout before the compressor and not after the compressor.
Why would that be happening?
Hi Howie,
The metering on the channel is post fader, so you’d only get a reading from the compressors output if the fader was at 0db. The clipping on the master is a bit more mysterious, have you got any sends on that channel? or effects on master?
You can use this vst to meter and adjust things more accurately btw,
http://www.sonalksis.com/index.php?section_id=99
You can always turn down the master for mixing, and once you done you can focus on getting things as hot as possible.
Also racks often have their own effects set-up and its possible in routing options to send signal directly to return track of the mixer. But I don’t think it’s a ‘standard’ option.
Anyway it’s my first post on this forum, and I’m not exactly an ableton expert, but hope it helps 