I’ve been having trouble in Ableton getting the volumes of quiet parts to stay low after exporting. i.e. let’s say the bassline drops out with the kick in the breakdown, for some reason all the other levels come up. When I remaster the exported wav using the master vol the results are patchy.
I have turned the annoying normalise function off. :w00t:
I generally master with EQ / Maximiser / Compression / Limiter as my chain or a slight variant thereof.
Any tips?
See for example - http://www.multifader.com/trax/Alpine9_(big%20room_mix).mp3
Cheers all!
M
Maybe it’s your compressor. It sounds like a sidechain issue. It gets louder when the kick and bass drop out almost sounds like there’s nothing feeding the compressor to make it duck the volume. So in turn, it sounds louder when you export it… I could be completely wrong though 
Raymond
You are usually spot on, so I take some comfort in saying… Not on this occasion though. The kick is still playing silently in the background feeding the compressor.
It might be how you have things bussed.
For example i nornally bus my kick, snare, hats, claps etc to a single bus with a compressor on it.
If you drop turn off the kick you will notice that the snare and the claps increase in volume - this in my opinion is because the kick triggers the compressor.
Dont think its anyhting to do with mixing it down - give it a try turn off your kick and see if the other levels come up - thats only if you have it bussed as i said previously.
Yeah, now that I think about it, Is your sidechain set to post mixer or post fx? If its set to post FX then you will still here the pump when the kick is muted because its still firing. If you do post mixer, then when the mixer isnt hearing the kick, neither is your sidechain. Deffo check how your busses are routed. Phil does post mixer in all of his tracks if you need a reference on what I’m talking about…
Raymond
Also, is it possible that you are doing some creative sidechaining using the hats to trigger offbeat wonk? Instead of the standard kick sidechain? This really has me thinkin as I had a similar problem to this with a synth getting really loud on a breakdown and it was because of some whacky sidechaining I was muckin with ;). Took me a week to figure it out 
Raymond