Ableton Forum

I'm sure most of you are already doing this, but a good way to mix is to freeze and flatten all of your tracks and save it as a seperate branch of your project - the "mixdown" phase of your project. This way all of the CPU you were using on MIDI devices and synth/sound design plug-ins can be routed towards mixdown plug-ins. Another benefit of mixing with audio is that you can see the decay tails and the little elements of each track, making automation a hell of a lot easier.

Makes sense. Something I'll try on my next project.

One question though... I use drumrack for my drums which would mean that all drum parts would then be flattened into one audio track - is it a good idea to EQ/Compress/Limit all drum parts as one?

Daniel_S wrote:Makes sense. Something I'll try on my next project.

One question though... I use drumrack for my drums which would mean that all drum parts would then be flattened into one audio track - is it a good idea to EQ/Compress/Limit all drum parts as one?

I always route each drum truck to their own individual audio track. The drum rack and all the routed audio drum hits would be in a one group. Not sure if this is the "right" method but it works for me.

There's no right way to do it, when I work strictly and software, I tend to route every single drum sound to its own track. But when I work with hardware drum machines, I'm fine doing the mixdown on the hardware and just recording a stereo output into the DAW. Between live's EQ and it's multiband compression, there's not much you can't fix in a stereo wav files these days.