r/ableton • u/Rubin163163 • 2d ago
[Question] Struggling with leveling and mastering in Ableton: How to get a punchy Boom Bap mix across all playback systems?
I need your help. My setup consists of a standard laptop with Ableton and Rode NTH-100 headphones. I produce Boom Bap hip-hop. I am struggling to set the volume levels correctly and achieve a proper sound.
To be more precise: in my monitoring headphones, my beat sounds great and loud, but Youlean Loudness Meter shows only -16 LUFS and clipping at +0.9. Later, when I listen on AirPods Pro 2 or in my car, the beat sounds completely dull and lifeless; it lacks punch and fullness. It sounds flat and overloaded. If I try to increase the volume of the drums, it results in heavy clipping.
I am, of course, utilizing compressors, a limiter, and EQs in Ableton.
Could you recommend a reliable guide on mastering and gain staging? In addition to video tutorials, I would greatly appreciate any practical tips, techniques, or rules of thumb for achieving a rich, punchy sound. I would prefer to avoid overly complex, highly technical content. I simply want to understand the appropriate volume levels for different elements of a beat and how to ensure proper sound translation across various devices, rather than just in monitoring headphones.
Thank you in advance for your advice and comments.
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u/qb_audio 2d ago edited 2d ago
The way youre describing it sounds like you are partially combining the mixing and mastering processes. When mastering, ideally you should be working with a finished stereo mix. If you're having to go back and adjust the levels of individual elements, the mix likely isn't actually finished yet. It's hard to say exactly what techniques would be most beneficial to you without hearing the material you're working with but I can give a couple basic tips without getting too technical.
Use references (while mixing AND mastering)! Seriously, Metric AB (and other tools like that) are incredibly useful especially when you run into issues like you have here. Compare your mix to a released song in the same genre or something that has the kind of mix youre going for. You can compare the balance of the elements, loudness stats, stereo imaging, etc., directly between the two (or more) songs. You mentioned you already have YLM2 which is great, that can help with comparing loudness and dynamics. Another free tool that would be useful is TDR Prism, a FFT spectrum analyzer that has some very useful routing options. You can use it to visually compare the overall balance of multiple sources. Create a separate track for your reference and put Prism on on it, then put prism on your master bus and select the instance on your reference as one of the inputs. You can set Prism to hold the max value while playing audio through it and use that to quickly visualize the difference between the overall frequency balance (if your song lacks low end compared to the reference, for example).
Clipping (the effect, not clipping your output) and saturation are your friends when mixing. Clipping can often be used on elements like drums to control peaks and increase perceived loudness while also increasing headroom. Take some time to play around with how it sounds when something is not clipped, clipped a little, and clipped too much. Learn how those sound and the kind of effect it has in a mix. Saturation can help make elements sound "thicker" and more dense, which also increases perceived loudness. In mixing you can get away with a lot more saturation but you often need to be more careful if using it when mastering. Again just take some time to mess around with it on some different sources to get a feel for how it effects each one.
Free tutorials are widely available and can probably cover what you're needing in more detail than I can here, though hopefully this helps get you moving in the right direction. A lot of this stuff just takes time and practice to fully understand so don't try to push yourself to make something sound perfect right away. Enjoy the process, make cool shit, make mistakes, and be kind to yourself.
Good luck and happy mixing!
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u/Rubin163163 1d ago
Thank you very much. These are exactly the principles that I needed. I have tried using various guides from YouTube, but I needed a more structured learning approach
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u/dmelt253 2d ago
Try removing any low frequency content from the instruments that don't need it using EQ. It eats up headroom and isn't adding anything necessary to the mix
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u/EggyT0ast 1d ago
You have some great tips from others so far. Read them and think about them.
My own advice is to apply appropriate compression on each track. This can mean, for example, putting a Glue compressor and setting it to an attack of 3 and release of .4, and move the Threshold until you're seeing it move just a little. After that, put a limiter and set the release to around 5ms, lookahead to 3, and adjust the ceiling until it's just barely hitting in the loudest parts. Once you're doing this to your tracks/groups, you can see how things are hitting the Main channel.
What I like to then do is do an export and open up the waveform to see where the loud parts are. Most likely you're going to see a very spiky waveform if you're at -16, but by focusing on the loud parts (where the underlying part looks the most "full") it saves you the headache of re-listening to the entire track.
You COULD simply toss a compressor & limiter on the main and then normalize, but that usually ends up with an amateur mix if your song has any dynamics in the arrangement (it makes quiet parts too loud and loud parts too squashed). What you want to do THEN is put a Utility after that limiter and adjust the gain there. You can also automate the gain on the Utility. Try to get the mix as close to 0.0 as you can. Pull the limiter down on very transient-heavy tracks (typically drums), and also be mindful of bass -- bass will artificially contribute to loudness and "flood" the song. Often applying some gentle shelving on bass starting around 60-80hz before you get into compression will help, and if you feel you're losing your bass then put a Saturator after the EQ to bring a little more definition to the sound.
There's more to it than the above, but at a very basic level what usually causes a weak mix is ignoring the strong spikes from percussion and letting bass override everything else. However, if you ONLY focus on those parts, you end up with a mix that feels like the drums are dead and the bass is gone. That's why you have to gently massage all of the tracks together, even if you focus on some tracks more than others.
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u/burnMELinWONDERLAND 2d ago
I can’t hear your mix but I’d try soft clipping pretty much everything but especially your bass and drums, and adding saturation to your master.
Chuck Saturator on your master before your final limiter, set it to analogue clip, digital clip, or if you want even more loudness soft sine, select soft clip, -6dB output, +6dB drive, and the ‘Low’ percentage in the minus to anywhere from 0 to -100%. This should keep the volume more or less the same but make things much louder. Play around with the settings a bit to get a feel for what it’s doing to the sound and what you want to get out of it, but in terms of increasing loudness, other than using a limiter, I’ve found this to be the most effective and direct method.
If you’re sitting at -16LUFs though that makes me think you haven’t got enough soft clipping and compression going on at the track level.
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u/rajkaos 2d ago
It’s really hard to get a good mix in headphones. Even though it’s an investment, getting some studio monitors will be worth it. I was in a similar situation with my mixes, and I was lucky enough to use my tax return to get a good set of monitors on sale. It was the most expensive piece of gear that I own, but it was so worth it. My mixes sound so much better now.
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u/idkaustin 1d ago
Yep. Judging transient impact especially is difficult on headphones, which really affects your ability to balance drums. And if you're making boom bap, that's like 90% of the material...
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u/hurricane-boyup 1d ago
Reboot and take some notes on compression! And maybe sidechaining idk this guy has it all
Next level sound
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u/ParadiseFrequency 1d ago
Try this trick: put your drums, kick, bass in one group. Put a clipper on this group, lower it's treshhold so that only 0.5db or less of kick is clipping and dont touch the kick. Level bass and other drums into this clipper. It's easy to head and the sound is immediately solid if you look at the group waveform
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u/DYSTOBY 1d ago
Clipping on drum/percussion groups might help to catch transients (or peaks, that is), but every kick is different, so recommending a fixed threeshshold will yield wild results.
Better would be to explain why and the concept and what to look for. Then it is usable in every situation.
But then again, this only lets you increase loudness.OP has to understand frequency masking of layers, psychoaccousitcs and sample selection.
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u/abletonlivenoob2024 1d ago
Forget about mastering for now. Focus on great sound design, great grooves, rhythms and melodies/chord(progressions). Then, after a few years focus on mixing. Only then, when your tracks already sound very good, start thinking about mastering. By then you should have a (very) good monitoring setup and lots of experience and ear training, so mastering will be within the realm of the possible.
P.S. there is absolutely no point in asking for mixing/mastering advice without giving some example of what the stuff actually sounds like. Not that this is really your issue (see above) but just in case it wasn't clear.
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u/SaintCharmed 1d ago
Sidechain your melody to the kick and send your drum bus through parallel compression so the drums hit harder.
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u/idkaustin 1d ago
Everyone is trying to give you good faith answers to your question, but no one has pointed out that you're asking the wrong question.
You are a beginner. Do not worry about mastering or loudness. You need to work on your actual composition / production skills. Study and copy beats you like. Focus on sound selection. Focus on filling up the frequency spectrum with complementary sounds.
This can only be "learned" by doing it over and over and over again to train your ears. Make 100 more beats, trying to get a little better with each one. There are no shortcuts, you have to put in the time and level up through experience.