Is there a way to see your mix while you are mixing?

[dannyvocal]

I may be doing this wrong, but to see a visual representation of my mix in Ableton while doing mixing I end up having to export my mix to an audio file and then open it in some third party software like Audacity. But is there a way to capture for any moment in time what my mix is going to look like without doing all that work? This is important as sometimes one risks raising the volume of an instrument, thinking it will mess up the entire mix an we'll have to then slowly fade down other tracks, only to see in our visual representation of the mix that that instrument, say a voice, or a synth, could actually go much higher without clipping the mix and urging us to change fader settings. But I don't know if there is a way to see what a mix is going to look like without exporting a stereo mix while I'm mixing in Ableton. Is there?

[dsu]

Coming from the 70's and mixing tape, it wasn't even possible to "see the mix" while mixing.

People used the meters, either VU or Peak meters. That method is pretty much how things work in the digital world. There are 3rd party meters that you can use but built into Live Session View on the far right side is the meter that shows your output signal. This track is labeled Master or in Live 12 Main.

It is a combination of a VU meter and a Peak meter. There is a bright green bar that goes up and down. This bar behaves similarly to the old school VU meters. The VU meter is showing the "average" level of the signal.

Above the bright green bar is a fainter green that leaves a small bright green line at the point of its highest excursion and stays there for a moment. This is the peak meter. It is intended to show the highest level which depending on the type of sound can be much higher than the average level and it changes very quickly. There is a small area at the top of the meter that displays the highest peak level detected during playback.

(when you dig in to the technical details a little deeper my description is not entirely accurate but it is a good place to start)

Here is why you don't want to look at the output waveforms while mixing.

Amplitude information changes so fast that you would find it to be very difficult to see any peaks on the screen before it had disappeared off the screen. Plus the amount of CPU and GPU resources needed to draw the waveforms in real time would high and offer very little value in my mind.

With respect to managing output levels of a mix what you need are a real time summary of what is going on so you can make decision. The output meters provide this summary.

[dannyvocal]

Thank you for your reply dsu. I greatly appreciate it and yes, of course I was aware of the green VU meter in the Master channel which is essential to keep an eye on (if I can keep that green light to even three quarters up, if the mix sounds good I'm more likely to have a dynamic mix, and more likely to give the mastering specialist more legspace to work with later). As an aside, the Greg Wells MixCentric plugin is an example of a program I can sit in the Master channel which also will control overall peaks so they stay under the Master channel 0db (no clipping). You're completely right, I wasn't thinking of the energy involved in such a feat as I was considering. And of course in the old days there were no such visual representations of a mix. Perhaps this falls into the category of our fantasy to get around the essential work our ears (actually our brain's auditory processing) must do to gauge levels, a skill we are better off taking time to improve, especially for home recording artists like me who have to learn recording skills in the modern world far beyond what the average musician had decades ago, who only had to deliver a nice take, leaving technical decisions to engineers). Having said all that, there is room for using other sensory processing, just as we use nonverbal facial and hand expressions to aid in communicating verbal information to each other. Seeing a mix, even a still image, is a modern digital phenomenon that can help, I've found, understand what instruments are most contributing to clipping, and which can be safely increased without doing so. But maybe that is a superfluous behavior on my part that I should learn to cut out? Thank you dsu!

[jonljacobi]

If you're only interested in EQ, the Spectrum audio effect will let you see the relative balance of frequencies. As to stereo placement, I seem to remember there being plugins for that, though I can't name any off hand.

[dannyvocal]

That's good to know about the frequency readout. How might frequency readings effect recording or mixing strategies?