The other day I was contacted by Ableton to teach a class at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. It was an intermediate class, so I wanted to bring something that could really level up their sound with Ableton Live. I put together a live set with stems and showed off a bunch of mixing techniques.
I wanted to share the Live Set I created and a few pointers on Mixing. Here is a before and after version. Notice how the vocals go more to the front and center and the drums have more power to them.
Here is the Live Set:
The way I set up this live set is I put a bunch of effects on all the different tracks. I then mapped all of them to the “0” (zero) key. That way you can A/B test it. Just hit the 0 key and check out the difference. You can then go through and see what I did.
The stems came from the dub track Run Run Run by Arise. The stems are up and can be downloaded to try out your mixing chops. http://www.cambridge-mt.com/ms-mtk.htm
If you want to look deeper into mixing techniques I suggest you check out my Mix Down Toolset. It has a huge collection of tools to level up the mix.
Here are some more articles that also look deeper into the techniques used in the example.
What is Mid/Side Mixing
Spatial Panning in Ableton Live
Making a Track Bigger
If you have downloaded the example and found your own tweaks, feel free to share in the comments below.
