J. Anthony Allen shows how to set up Ableton Live for mastering: strip the session to one stereo track, remove all effects and sends, disable warping, set faders to unity gain, and check the pre-master audio. The goal is a clean, effect-free environment that mimics a tape machine before you add any processing.
Okay, in this section we're going to talk about setting up our session. And this all falls under this big heading of preparing to master. Okay. There's a couple things we want to make sure we have right before we dive into the track. So we're going to, in this section, we're going to look at the actual track we're going to master. We're going to make sure that it's all ready to be mastered and we're going to start to do a couple a little nip tuck things, kind of first level stuff that we should do on any mastering project. Okay, so first let's talk about setting up our session. Now, no matter what daw you're using, there's a couple things you should do just to make sure you have a completely blank slate. Okay. We want to make sure that our daw is not processing this track in any way until we tell it to. Everything is very delicate here, so we want a very clean track. We basically just want like a, we want to emulate like a tape machine, right? Like just. It just is what it is. No effects, no nothing. Okay. So first thing I'm going to do, so I'm going to get rid of any tracks I'm not going to use. I want one stereo audio track. That is all I want on this session. Okay. Next I'm going to go in, I'm going to make sure there's no effects on that track. Okay. So this is where my effects would show up. There's nothing there. I'm going to look at my master track, make sure there's no effects on the master. Okay. I'm going to look at my sends, make sure I'm not sending anything. Okay, These are down and they're going to stay down. All our effects processing that we do in mastering we're going to do directly on the track. Now I know that in the production steps and even in the mixing steps we've talked about, you know, applying some effects via bus, like time based effects like delays and reverbs and things are better sometimes to use on a bus and then apply into the effect. And that is still true, but it's not part of mastering. On mastering we're going to do everything right on top of the track. Okay. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn my grid off. So you can see here, I'm on a grid of full measure is what I'm looking at here. Okay. So whatever your daw needs, turn that grid off. Because we want very Fine resolution here. It's easiest just to turn off the grid entirely. Okay. So for me, I'm going to control, click, go to fixed grid off. Okay. Now I get kind of dotted lines, but I can do any kind of fidelity and I'm not locked into any kind of grid. Grid. Cool. Okay, now I'm going to pull my track in. So this is the track we're going to master. I'm going to drop it in and I'm going to put it all the way back here. Okay, this looks pretty good. Let's just hear what we got. Here's the kind of loud part. This is kind of like a rock tune. There's one big thing we have left to do, and I want to just hear a little of this to kind of demonstrate it. So here we go. Okay. So you don't know this track like I do. This is a student track. And the thing that I know that you don't is that this is way fast. Ableton is playing this way fast. So if you are in Ableton, one step you need to do is turn off warping. And this is super important. So what warping does for you non Ableton users is it basically analyzes the tempo of the track and then tries to play the track at our session tempo. So it's trying to conform the tempo of this track to our session tempo, which is currently 96 bpm. So we need to tell it not to do that. Play it at its actual tempo. So I'm going to double click, go into my warp settings here and turn off warping. Okay, Now I'm going to play this track and it's going to sound really slow. Okay. This is the actual tempo of the track. Okay. It's not the other one. The fast tempo I kind of liked, actually, and I'm kind of into it, but it's not my track. It's not my decision to make. So we're going to call that good. This is where the artist made it, and this is the correct track. Okay. So we've turned off warping. We've turned off our grid. Last thing I want to do here is I want to make sure all my levels are set to zero. Okay. So I'm going to go here. Here's my main volume level. And this is really hard to read. It does say zero here, so I can move it up and down. If this is at anything other than zero in Ableton, you can just click on it and press delete to get it back to zero. But if you want to see it a little better. You could go over to session view here. This is kind of how we look at meters in Ableton. I'm gonna make these as big as I can, which is this. And here is my level. It's basically the same thing I was looking at over and before I switched to this view. So here it is. Okay, so I'm just gonna make sure this is perfectly and exactly at zero. I'm also gonna make sure my master fader set is perfectly and exactly at zero. Okay, don't worry about this for now. This little peak indicator, we'll deal with that later. Okay, the next thing we need to do is take a close look at our pre master at this track we just pulled in here. See if there's anything we have to deal with right away. So let's go to a new video and let's focus in on this version of this track and make sure that it's ready to be mastered.
