Mastering Dance Music in Ableton Live Part 3: Final EQ and Limiting

Amazing tutorial and results with just stock ableton plug ins! Never knew these plug ins could be used this way gonna try it out!

It's amazing man, thank you very much. I was looking for this tutorial since a long time.

Excellent video.

Awesome! Really awesome thank you!

Nice series!

Thank you this guide changed my life! :)

Nice bro, love it ;)

Thanks for this tutorial guys, Alex Zinn you are a wizard

im surprised there was no compression of any kind applied to the stereo channel. Is this to preserve transients or it just happens with that little bit of glue in the sum bus? or because its higher frequencies in the stereo field overall?

great stuff really helped me out and was very informative id enjoy more tuts from him : )

when exporting the original track from ableton, should I down the master volume instead of putting limiters on the master in case my instruments are peaking? thank you for your help, excelent video

Thanks ! thats one of the best auto tutorial ever ! simple and efficient.

Nice!! Basically my tracks sound like the unprocessed one. Which is.. obvious since I haven't mastered it it yet, a least not correctly.
But my main problem is volume and a friend of mine told me volume is part of mixing instead of mastering, but I suppose a big part of volume comes from clean sound so every sound has it's full potential? Could someone explain more about this to me?
Also I am running ableton live lite, so it's kinda hard since I am missing all of these plugins :( I'll try my best tho

+Point Blank Music School why turn the lookahead down? how does it affect the mastering process?

Great series, thanks for posting!

Really nice to learn from this, as a producer i always see blank when i hear the word mastering, now i had to do it cause im in a situation. So i follow your steps, i maybe not doing it as quality as you do, but i realize how much a good mastering can ad to a track, thanks again.

i've finished my master, but it kinda loss some panning of some elements ... the hihat for example, it was at my right in the mix, and when i've finished the master i hear it hitting in the middle and both sides...
i've tried panning the hihat (40R) and i've tried to pan with simple delay, timming at 1ms (L) and 10ms (R) ... none of this have worked so far
what i'm doing wrong?

def has made a difference with my mastering process, thanks! One issue I've recently noticed is that in some of my projects, the panning disappears or become diluted after using this mastering technique... Wondering if Im missing or messing up a step at some point in the process? Anyone feel free to help out!

How can I remove the noise? When I work on on the SUM BUS it's really high..

Alex is the Boss! Will there be a Mixing Techno Tutorial from him?

my buddy asked me to watch this video through my laptop speakers. couldn't believe it. he told me to look for the difference especially when the engineer compares the processed to the unprocessed. it blew my mind the differences in quality. obviously, i couldn't hear every little detail but of what I could hear was huge. I eventually tried it on different speakers and eventually in the studio but this video has been a huge help to introducing me to mastering.

Thank you so much for putting this series up.

are you using 'oversampling' for the EQ8 or Glue comp?

That RMS meter is moving fast! Are you really measuring the RMS of your track correctly? It seams to me that you're only measuring the loudness of your peaks...

could you explain the settings on the spectrum analyzer? 
Also, what should come first in case you use it, a maximizer like sausage fattener, or the limiter, and what's the difference between the two?

Very good tutorial cheers PB.

***** - I have been watching PBs videos for a few years now, and the head of the school JC says that we shouldn't have too much of a wide stereo field in the mix for clubs.  But, at the end of this video, both the vocal and effects are very wide both on my TV and through monitors.  Would this not work in a club?

Loved this series and am about to try it on my own tracks :)

Thanks for any response, peace!

Fantastic series of videos Alex and I love how you kept to the stock plugins. I now feel a little more confident about reaching for that damn multiband compressor too... ;)

Great Tutorial !!!!

Reminder to myself to watch the full series

Can i have the track name and where to find it? :)

I ran into some problems when using this method .. each copy of multiband compressor creates micro-delays on mono bus (which absent on stereo bus).  In result - significant phase issues on SUM BUS.

No backups for 14 days... I too like to live dangerously.

You should have turned down the level of your mastered version not used a limiter on the dry, when comparing A/B. As the dry version was being compressed (so it's not dry)