'Mastering' for live performance

[flippo]

interested to hear peoples experience for doing some mastering, and I guess general mixing aswell, for live electronica/dance via Ableton. I guess mixing isn't as much of a concern for me as I will be mostly using sounds that are pre-mixed for eachother, as apposed to random mashups of different sources.


Does anyone have any cool ideas for racks that they can easily adjust on the fly?

I've come up with a quick prototype -, basically it's a frequency splitter, one chain to compress sub bass, other for multi band comp on everything else - and then a limiter on the end.

It has the following macros

Multiband Amount, Multiband Ratio, Low/high output amount, mid output amount
Sub crossover, sub threashold, sub ratio, master limiter input.

all the macros have 'sensible' upper and lower limits - it's pretty intuitive and straight forward to use in studio for rough master dynamics, with basic control over some frequencies.

In your experience is there much point having any degree of control over that, given that it is difficult to understand what the rig sounds like for the audience? is it just another control to worry about?

Perhaps you're better of getting the best overall compromise at home on monitors and locking in those parameters and hoping for the best?

or do you just run a slightly cooler signal into the DJ mixer, boost the gain a bit there and rely a bit of the PA's comp and limiting? I've heard that one before too. (I've DJ'ed for a few years now but tbh I'm not massively savvy with club/festival PA gain structure and dynamics processing)


I'm not after a really compressed/loud sound (I've heard some laptop sets that are blatantly running -10db Waves L2 and it sounds like absolute arse). I do want some dynamics, just a sensible compromise I guess.

[oddstep]

generally i just have a transparent limiter. Sometimes i have eqs, either on 'stems' for each instrument or on the master. This allows me to tune the frequency balance during a soundcheck. Anything more than this would need a longer soundcheck to get right. What you're thinking about could be a great performance tool- but could also have unwelcome interactions with club pas.

[3dot...]

all my tracks are routed to these sub-tracks (each has a specific freq range):
Drums (4 drum tracks)
Percussion (2 tracks)
Bass(3 ch of external audio-Evolver/Bass Guitar/looper)
Harmony (2 tracks)
FX (4 fx-aux tracks+ 1 Absynth track)

all this setup has A/B assigments so I can actually mix between 2 "virtual" setups using the x-fader

[oddstep]

mmm a b output setups. Tasty. Good idea

[Tarekith]

I just try and and get everything balanced and good sounding without clipping the master channel, maybe using a limiter on the master just in case. I leave it up t the DJ mixer or house mixer to make it loud. Most decent plug ins for 'mastering' tend to be too CPU intensive for me to want to run in a live situation.