Here’s the sec­ond of a bunch of posts about how I use Able­ton Live. In my first post I talked about lots and lots of gear, and, as it turns out, most of that gear actu­al­ly does something!

The 4Pre han­dles all the audio com­ing into and out of Live and needs to be set up first. That’s done in the Audio tab of Live’s preferences:

Hon­est­ly, I’m kin­da assum­ing you know how to do this stuff already. But, just in case, it’s also impor­tant to select the inputs and out­puts you actu­al­ly want active, which is done via the ​“Input Con­fig” and ​“Out­put Con­fig” buttons:

The less I/O you have active, the less of a strain Live will be on your com­put­er, so I like to acti­vate only what’s need­ed; for me, that’s the 4Pre’s four mic inputs, four line out­puts, and head­phone chan­nels (out­puts 7 and 8).

Back in Live’s Pref­er­ences, I’ll usu­al­ly keep the sam­ple rate at 44.1 and the buffer at 64 sam­ples, which keeps things rel­a­tive­ly latency-free.

The Mon­i­tor Mix

With Wits, the most basic and con­sis­tent need from Live is an in-ear mon­i­tor mix. A bare bones ses­sion will look some­thing like this:

There are five tracks on this ses­sion; the tracks on the left make up the mon­i­tor mix, the tracks on the right are the mix busses. As you can prob­a­bly guess, ​“Mon­i­tor” is what I lis­ten to, and ​“Mas­ter” is the default feed to the house engineers.

A mon­i­tor mix for Wits can be tricky; not only are there music cues and the pri­ma­ry need to hear what’s hap­pen­ing with the music guests, but tons of cues come from the voice actors dur­ing sketch­es as well. My sit­u­a­tion is made a lot eas­i­er thanks to Wits’s broad­cast engi­neer Corey Schrep­pel, who sends out a broad­cast-ready mix from the sound booth.

That broad­cast mix takes care of the dia­logue and most of the music needs, but the drums are pret­ty qui­et on it, and it’s hard to get a sense of my place in the stage vol­ume. So, I also have a mic set up off stage, point­ing towards the band. A blend of the two sources makes for a real­ly easy sound­check and near-per­fect mon­i­tor­ing situation.

Both the broad­cast mix and the stage mic are sent to me at mic-lev­el via XLR cables. I plug those into the pre­amps on my 4Pre and cre­ate two cor­re­spond­ing tracks in Live, ​“Radio Feed” and ​“Stage.” Those two tracks are grouped togeth­er; the group’s bus is titled ​“Mon­i­tor.” Then I cre­ate a return track, also titled ​“Mon­i­tor.”

Rout­ing

The rout­ing for all this is set up in Live’s I/O:

The inputs for the broad­cast mix and the stage mic are both set to ​“Ext. In” (that’s the 4Pre) and their respec­tive inputs (3 and 4). Mon­i­tor­ing is set to ​“In,” which means the sig­nal is always being heard regard­less of the trans­port sta­tus. The out­puts are set to the group bus, and out­put of the group bus, Mon­i­tor, is set to ​“Sends Only.” This sends the audio ONLY to the return tracks and not to the Mas­ter mix bus. 

The send knob ​“A” on each track con­trols how much sig­nal goes to the ​“A” return track; in this case, Mon­i­tor. Final­ly, the Mon­i­tor out­put is set to exter­nal outs 7 and 8, the 4Pre’s head­phone output.

If you’re new to Live, or mix­ing in gen­er­al, this might seem a lit­tle con­vo­lut­ed (if you’re not new to Live or to mix­ing, it’s safe to wake up now) but after some time you’ll see what’s hap­pen­ing is pret­ty sim­ple — all of your mon­i­tor sources are bussed via sends to a return track, which is sent to the head­phones. Easy peasy.

I usu­al­ly throw a few effects on the tracks — some com­pres­sion (usu­al­ly the ​“Mix Gel” pre­set on the Mon­i­tor bus), a high-pass EQ to cut the stage rum­ble — but most impor­tant­ly I put Live’s Util­i­ty effect and a lim­iter on the Mon­i­tor return:

Since sounds are being sent to the house in mono, I want to make sure to lis­ten to whatever’s hap­pen­ing in Live in mono as well. The Util­i­ty plu­g­in takes care of this; set­ting its width to 0% effec­tive­ly sums the left and right chan­nels. The lim­iter is in place to keep any audio spikes from fry­ing my mon­i­tor mix and, in turn, my eardrums. 

The same effects are put on the Mas­ter bus; keep­ing things mono at the bus helps me mon­i­tor the meters appro­pri­ate­ly, and the lim­iter is a safe­guard against any dis­tor­tion from clipping.

I set the ​“Cue Out” of the Mas­ter bus to ​“7/8” — this sends Live’s metronome and oth­er cue-only sig­nals to the head­phones — and the ​“Sends” but­ton to ​“Pre.” The pre-fad­er set­ting means all track sends are mon­i­tored before their vol­ume is adjust­ed by faders. This way, the mix being tweaked for the house won’t affect the return tracks; i.e., my mon­i­tor mix.

Mix It Up

In the end, what I end up with is a great in-ear mix I can set up fast and tweak from onstage. I can adjust the lev­els between mix sources, add any effects I need, and adjust the over­all lev­el of the mon­i­tor mix eas­i­ly by adjust­ing the fad­er on the Mon­i­tor bus, mapped to a knob on my SPD-SX.

Of course, one big rea­son for using in-ears in the first place is to have a sneaky way to lis­ten to click tracks; my next post describes how I set them up and nav­i­gate the ses­sion. In the mean­time, feel free to send me a mes­sage if you’ve got a ques­tion, or want some­thing explained, in more detail, very badly.