Ableton Mastering Template

This Ableton Live Project file will aid speeding up your mastering workflow as well as helping you achieve clean, crisp and heavy masters across multiple styles and genres of music.

Featuring 3 carefully crafted racks that are made using only with native Ableton and Max for Live devices, it will help you achieve the desired sound in a matter of seconds.

The 3 racks have been specially made in order to cover various genres of music.

Check out our quick demonstration video below, where we feature the audio from Daylight, our Ableton Template for Deep House.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

We suggest putting your pre-master files into the “PREMASTER” folder;

The “PREMASTER” channel has a Utility providing some gain and a limiter to safely bring it up to 0db. Once you have dialed in the desired settings on the one of the racks you can A/B the pre master and the mastered version by soloing each channel, and compare the two to make sure you haven’t added or taken away too much.

BUT WHAT ABOUT LUFS?

LUFS (Loudness Units Full Scale) is of course a big topic in mastering, audio distribution and streaming. There are no native or free Max4Live plugins that can tell you the LUFS of your source audio, however as a guideline, all of these racks will achieve LUFS of around -14 at the most gentle settings to as high as -6 LUFS at their most aggressive settings. If you need accurate LUFS monitoring we can recommend the Loudness Meter by Youlean that has a very effective free version, and also the Swiss Army Meter M4L device by Noir Labs at a very reasonable $3! 

ABOUT THE RACK STYLES

Rack 1 is a very aggressive style of master chain which adds depth in the lows and lots of energy to the highs. It is best suited to heavy styles of music like Trap/Hip-Hop, Techno, Drum & Bass and Metal. Play around with the release and saturation controls on the Color Limiter for extra attitude.

Rack 2 is a more ‘airy’ style of mastering which will provide nice warmth and punch across the frequency spectrum and can do especially nice things with the mid-range of a track. This rack is well suited to styles like Minimal/Deep House, Psy Trance, Future Bass or Lo-Fi Hip-Hop/Trip Hop and Rock.

Rack 3 is punchy and dynamic and utilizes two limiters for extra crisp loudness. Be sure neither of them do more than 3db gain reduction and you will get an end result that pops and bounces nicely bringing a lot of life to your mix. This rack will be great for all styles but will certainly work well for Pop, Jazz and Indie/Nu-disco.

OTHER INFO

It is recommended that you only use the solo function to listen to one track at a time. All of the Audio Tracks are turned off by default to stop any unhappy accidents! The Master channel has some useful tools including a ‘safety’ limiter and a M4L device called Visualizer which has some handy imaging tools, but turn this off when you are not using it to save CPU.

*Requires Ableton Live 10.1.30

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