Keep your channel faders low and the Master at 0db!
Posted January 25th, 2008 by Oliver CheslerFiled Under: Ableton Live, plug-ins
Today I would like to talk about the biggest epiphany I had when it comes to recording entirely inside a computer. If you take one thing away with you by reading this blog this should be it. In 1996, Steinberg released Cubase VST which stands for Virtual Studio Technology. For the first time, someone with a limited budget and a PC could record audio to the hard drive and have access to a virtual effects rack and software synthesizers. People today call this mixing “in the box”. This had profound
implications, so much so I would compare it to the release of the Tascam 4-Track Portastudio. Recently, laptops have become so powerful that they themselves can be full virtual studios anywhere you are.
Almost weekly I am asked for mixing advice. Usually after a few probing questions I discover that 90% of the people unhappy with their sound are making the same mistake. They are completely overdriving their internal summing bus! Take all your song’s individual channel faders and bring them at least -12db and keep the Master fader at 0dB at all times.
Look at your DAW’s mixer. Now imagine the volume of your individual channel fader’s adding up from left to right heading to your Master. If you keep your channel faders close to zero surely your Master will go over odB and clip. As we all know any clipping in the digital realm is very bad.
Why not keep your channel faders all hot and turn the master down? Because you will still be overdriving cheap plug-ins. Well written plug-ins can handle a hot signal but some of the coolest freeware and to be honest some big name effects clip internally when even a warm signal is shot at them. The worst part about this happening is there is no visual warning. All you know is your mixes just sound like crap.
If you ran a test overdriving one plug-in and pushing a channel fader too hot you may not notice anything. But keep your levels low in a complicated song with over 10 channels and you will definitely notice a major improvement.
If this is news to you don’t stress about it. It took me a while to wrap my head around it. To give credit where it’s due I first came across this advice when reading an article in EQ magazine by Craig Anderton. After I read it I emailed 
him to clarify some questions I had. He was graceful enough to answer me and I then did some searches online and found this was huge discussion on several high end pro-audio forums. Forum members at Tapeop, Gearslutz and the Digidesign sites were rambling on about audio levels and mixing ITB. Most of the threads were over 50 pages. Everyone was learning the same lesson.
How did I choose -12db as a start point? First, each DAW has a different summing engine so your own number may differ. I use Ableton Live and originally I was starting projects with channel faders at -6db. However, I constantly had to adjust them all down as I built the songs up. I settled at -10db but recently I noticed something very interesting. In Live 7 they introduced Drum Racks and a Slice to Midi feature. A group set of faders becomes automatically available to you for the individual drum sounds of audio slices the new features create. Guess what? The channel faders are automatically set to -12db! It seems Ableton headquarters has also caught on how to make their DAW sound better. Interesting no?
In Ableton Live if you hover over the Track Volume slider you can see the exact dB it’s set at by looking at the Status Bar located bottom left of the screen. If you click on a channel faders small left facing triangle you can then use the up and down arrows to nudge the volume in small increments.
As I mentioned in this post something to keep in mind is when you add EQ to a sound you add dBs. If you add +6db of high end EQ to a vocal you may want to adjust the channel fader. Lastly, I add a limiter to the Master and set it at -0.1 to catch anything that manages to spike a little too loud. Anyone with a Mac has Apple’s free AU limiter built-in.
I think you will really enjoy mixing quiet a lot more once you try this method.
photo credit: oooh.oooh
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January 25th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Nice one, thanks for clearing that up, I’ll definitely try it.
I’ll have to have a search around the options menus of Cubase SX 2 to see if it has a similar function to set the faders to -12db, though I’m sure it would.
This would somewhat revolutionalise my mixing as usually I try and keep my kick drums hitting close to 0db, and mix around that, continually dropping the master fader as the song builds. I guess using this method my kick drums will be hitting -12db. That sounds very low to me, and in the early stages of a track I will probably just have to turn my amp up, but I will try it regardless.
January 25th, 2008 at 8:30 am
I would suggest using either compression or some other plug-in like Izotope Trash to get your kick sounding the way you want. You could also consider a sub-mix of all your drums. Honestly though if your music sounds the way you want it too then don’t change anything. I should have added that into the article… the sound is the most important thing not any numbers.
January 25th, 2008 at 8:39 am
Thanks for the tips. I’ve been slowly learning this lesson myself. It takes a lot of determination in order to keep those faders down. It’s a good idea to remind people that if you want to keep things banging, as you push down the faders, you can turn up the volume on your monitors to compensate for the loss of volume energy in the mix. That said, it’s always better to mix at low volumes, but few of us want to
Here’s another question… in your helpful screen shot the level in the Master is right at 0db. If you final mix was that high - does that give a mastering engineer enough headroom to work with? My guess is no, but it’s just a guess because none of my work ever gets sent to a real mastering engineer! But I believe that if you plan on mastering, you are going to need additional headroom in the Master fader. I plan on mastering a lot more in the future, and I’d like to learn more about building a mix for this process.
January 25th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Yes, this is absolutely a must thing to know. I suspect a lot of those who claim that their mixes in Ableton Live are muddy are indeed overloading the bus. Not that Ableton has tried to clean up some of the issues in Live 7.0, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
I wish Live had the same feature Logic has had for ages where you could select multiple or all volume sliders, and when you move down one, the others also go down. This is a quick way to adjust a group or all channels in case during production they have gone up again. This seems to be a common pattern when producing….
Another idea is to place the Utility in the master and control the total value returned into the master bus. I’ve seen this idea used even with Logic, the Plaid demo project in the Logic Studio package has a gain adjuster in the master bus. This also works well, as I do think that the limiters and exciters don’t work well if the incoming signal is very hot.
January 25th, 2008 at 11:44 am
You bring up two great points… Ableton really needs to let us grab multiple faders at the same time and I also use the Utility plug-in sometimes when dealing with level issues. By the way to people stopping by and reading this be sure to check out Kent’s blog and music: http://www.kentsandvik.com
January 25th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Hi Oliver
Thanks for this great tip. But I have a doubt, Would-12db be TOP limit for the fader in each channel when mixing? Or just a starting point.
Thanks!
January 25th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Oh just a starting point. I usually find if I start the fader off at less than that I have to adjust them down later. The only thing I would say keep set is the Master fader at 0dB.
January 26th, 2008 at 12:50 am
Excellent advise. But at the same time i know i’ve been using live for about 3 months and i’ve already caught on that when the master turns red things start sounding bad. I mean this isn’t rocket science, its red for a reason, don’t ignore it. And especially in live you can see levels between plug-ins, so if you see something coming out really hot from a distortion plug say, insert a utility and keep it under control, you’ll notice the difference immediately.
February 19th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Awesome advice. Thanks,am fairly new and was having problems with this.
One thing though I was wondering is for a drum rack, do we turn the drum rack down -12 if the individual tracks are down?
March 28th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Great advice. I’m learning so much about mixing from these lessons.
I’ve got a nice limiter/mastering plug in and wonder if you’d recommend extracting down to a .wav file and then bringing that .wav file in for mastering or if you’d do it in the original mix by putting the mastering plug in with the master bus?
Thanks again.
alec…
March 28th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
April 10th, 2008 at 4:38 am
this idea is basically all about gain structure.so technically u should send the hottest signal to the channel strip without clipping. after processing the individual channels,they sum up at the master fader. having many channels feeding the master will def push it to the red
April 10th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Kentsandvik website does not work…?
Nice article Oliver.
Any luck pointing me towards effective use of the A/B switching?
I get the gist if it; just curious about its use.
thanks!
.dave.anton.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:05 am
hi oliver,
wonderful post. here’s a little quote from the live manual that really threw me off: “Because of the enormous headroom of Live’s 32-bit
April 29th, 2008 at 8:12 am
hi oliver,
something must have happened with that last comment because the quote from the live manual got cut off…
here’s the gist of what i was asking: when exporting from live, i’ve noticed that the “normalize” feature will attenuate a signal that would otherwise clip (believe it or not, i actually tried to get live to clip an exported signal at one point and noticed this). therefore, is there anything other than signal clipping that can be a problem when you let the master signal go into the red?
thanks so much!
- mike
April 29th, 2008 at 9:01 am
April 29th, 2008 at 9:28 am
cool. if my first comment hadn’t been cut off and i wasn’t too lazy, i would have explained that the point you made about plug-ins distorting was a big revelation to me. so, thanks a million for that one! however, i was just asking about the master fader level specifically (i.e. assuming everything is sounding good up to that point in the signal flow) and wondering if you had any insight on that issue specifically.
thanks again for all your great posts!
June 27th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Wicked , thanks for the tip!
I tried this out and my mixes are much clearer and easier to control now . I’ve noticed that my overall result after exporting the track is very low in volume . I’m not skilled in mastering so , i was wondering if there’s any tips you could give on how to get a louder result without clipping and destroying the final mix.
Amazing blog btw !
June 28th, 2008 at 11:45 am
June 29th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Much appreciated , thanks!