Ableton for Music Creators and Artists
Course 7: Mixdown

You’ve got the instrumentation, the vocals, the beats, and the bass. You’ve got chord progressions, effects, and variations. This course is all about polishing up the mix and getting everything sounding right together. To do this, you’ll be incorporating several audio effects that will really add some seasoning while bringing a lot of balance.

You’ll learn about clip envelopes, sidechaining, compression, equalization, and rendering and practice each of these processes as homework. Your assignment for this course will be to modulate at least four clips using different warp modes and automation. The course will also cover how to properly render your music for mass consumption.

Not all platforms (radio, streaming, etc.) use the same file formats. You’ll learn the differences between these formats and how to use Ableton to save your music in applicable formats. For the digital field trip, you’ll explore the possibilities of the open-ended, customizable Eurorack, a modular synthesizer that you can customize to your needs.

For your listening library assignment, pick a commercially produced and released album of your choice and choose a song that you think most resembles the sound you’re shooting for with your song. You’ll finish a course review, blog entry, and quiz as a matter of course, but also learn how to use social media to get your name/brand marketing off the ground.