Tips for boosting/balancing sessions for live performance

[sereptie]

I've been producing tracks for years now I am about to venture into live performance. Most of my tracks have been produced using a limiter chain on the master channel, which means my final mixes sound radically different than individually bounced stems imported into the performance session.

Considering both this and the use of compression or distortion buses, what is an optimal way to build a set with with a full and cohesive sound that won't take a trillion years to fine tune? Typically I've been exporting 4 stems per track and duplicating them over the A/B fader for a total of 8 tracks.

I've played in bands and know that a room changes everything. Things feel a bit more 'naked' with just a laptop. I'm looking for a to ensure an uncompromised sound and performance without simply pressing play on a fully rendered versions of my music.

Thanks for your help!

Also, I'd live to connect for live events. Here is a sampling:

https://soundcloud.com/sereptie/no-resumes

[sereptie]

bump

[JoshG567]

Unless the limiter is running constantly (i.e. gain reduction never returns to zero), couldn't you just run your stems with the limiter you use in production on your Master? Is it a 3rd party CPU hog?

[sereptie]

I've been using a series of three limiters which include the Waves L1 Ultramaximizer. That has been the key ingredient in getting my mixes sounding rich (I use two of Ableton's native limiters to take the initial cuts, however). There seems to be an unresolvable latency issue when I slap on the chain with the L1, which is always. Sometimes I have to delete the chain entirely to record midi or audio accurately before putting it back on and mixing the track.

I've tried using it on the live session to no avail. It sounds different than the mixes too for some reason. Maybe I can swap out the L1 for another limiter, like Live's native one.

I'm curious what other folks are putting their master channel in their performance sessions...

[Tarekith]

For me, typically nothing. By the time you get to playing on a proper sound system, assuming you had a soundcheck and there's someone running sound who knows you're going to need to be turned up compared to a DJ, no issue. You'll still be plenty loud, and nice and dynamic.

But, sometimes that's not the case, and you can't turn up more, or whatever.

Usually I find there's no way around needing to "re-mixdown" all your stems in the new project to make sure your volume is consistant song to song during the set. At some point you're going to have adjust each song so they they all are roughly the same volume. After that, it's simple to put a limiter on the master to bump the volume more, since all the songs are roughly the same volume already, so no surprises with input levels.

I still do a quick check to make sure the limiter didn't boost one song more than the rest, but usually it's minor tweaks from that point.

Either way, the critical part is making all your tracks in the set roughly the same volume, so you have to do the hard bit either way.

[sereptie]

Thanks.