Mastering a Track in Ableton Live

Often overlooked, mastering is art of applying the finishing touches to a track and is the very last thing before it can finally receive the stamp of approval. It can sometimes be hard to visualise (audiolise?) the final result of a song - or at least I have trouble doing so - but at some point you have to refrain from making tiny little adjustments to the composition and put your foot down; its time to finish the song whether you like it or not.

Mixing and mastering require a fresh start and a blank frame of mind which is why it is common for the singer/songwriter or producer to hand off the project to a dedicated mix and mastering engineer. Unfortunately many of us don't have that luxury and although I'm constantly improving in this area, (and by no means an expert!) but here is how I mastered my recent track in Ableton Live 11.

This chain is a mix of stock effects and 3rd party plugins applied to the master output. Typically you'll want to bounce the song to a new project in order to stop yourself from making small edits, but some might prefer having the control of the full composition.

Firstly we start with the 'Utility' plugin. This is standard on every single one of my individual tracks and the master track is no exception. It contains simple functions like gain control, panning and stereo width but most importantly the 'Bass Mono' button. This is a shortcut to keep lower frequencies to mono which is important as it keeps the foundations of your track centred like the bass and kick. These are the driving forces in the mix and can be lost in a stereo mix if not properly handled. Also keep in mind that many devices or environments where your track might be played may not even be capable of stereo output so these elements need to function perfectly.

The first VST plug-in I've used is called 'Wider' by Polyverse. It is free and provides a similar function to the Width knob on the Utility effect. All it does is use an algorithm to add a little more stereo width to the overall mix. This shouldn't be used as a replacement to other width techniques such as using reverb or delays on specific tracks that require them, but can add just a bit more depth. I prefer using this over the stock plugin as I find it doesn't add as much perceivable loudness to the track like Utility tends to.

Alongside this we have the first EQ applied in 'Mid/Side' mode; this does what it says on the tin and allows you to separately adjust the middle (mono) and sides (stereo) of the mix. With this we are tailing off the low end slightly below 35hz in the mid to reduce unwanted distortion and about 100hz in the sides which compliments what I was saying previously while removing any artefacts we may have just added with the previous effect.

'Fresh Air' is a VST from Slate Digital and is a sort of cheat sheet for adding brightness to the mid and high frequencies based on vintage exciter circuits. This is where the second EQ would come in instead. Adding a high shelf or boosting specific frequencies will add more harmonics where necessary.

Next up is an Auto Filter, similar to an EQ it can apply different filter cut-offs to the entire track which I like to automate during the track to remove certain frequencies. This is more of a creative mixing techies but can also be used to quickly minimize problem frequency ranges.

The Glue Compressor is a unique Ableton Live stock compressor modelled after a popular vintage bus compressor from the 1980's. For electronic music such as this track, the kick is the core, and so we are lightly sidechaining the entire master to the kick input channel to create a pumping motion that you can feel more than hear. Keep the attack near the max and the release at the minimum with a low ratio. Adjust the threshold so that the compressor is squashing around 1-3db. A neat trick is to enable the high-pass filter on the EQ section so that the kick doesn't completely overpower everything. The objective is to "glue" the track together, and you should see the needle on the interface bouncing in time with the groove.

After that a standard compressor which is set to peak mode and is just to squash those outliers that creep to far away from the general noise level, this is done so that we can raise the perceived loudness later on without raising the actual volume too much. This is again very common in electronic music where every song tries to be as loud as possible.

Ozone 9 is an expensive but extremely capable mastering suite by iZotope and while an in-depth review would be another article on its own, it even offers an AI-powered assistant that can listen to your track and provide a baseline and suggestions on how to master your track. There is a varierty of modules from EQ to Dynamics and stereo imaging tools but one of the most important is the maximizer which will set the track to the correct volume levels based on whether you want to output to a streaming service (in which case -1db) or to physical media like CD.

Lastly a hard Limiter for good measure. If everything has done its job so far this shouldn't be doing anything really, but it's set to -0.30db as an absolute barrier with a 3ms lookahead which essentially means it will look to see if spikes exceed that value and limit them in advance.

And that's it. Check out the track - a remix of a popular song by Seeb in the audio section.