I get asked and see people ask on the forums whether it’s safe to drive channels red in a DAW. Some people say yes, some say no. Well, here’s the fact:

In some DAWs at least, it’s perfectly OK to run the tracks red if the DAW has what’s called a 32-bit floating point engine. This means you can run individual channels as loud as you want as long as the master isn’t hitting red – and it won’t distort/clip.
You should probably check the manual of your DAW if it has info on the abovementioned engine.

Another thing, however, is running the signal red between plugins; that in general should be avoided (as some plugins can’t handle loud input levels very well). Proper gainstaging never hurts; every time I want to keep the level at bay (especially on the master), I use VU Meter by Hornet Plugins.

A video posted by Fanu / FatGyver (Janne Hatula) (@fanufatgyver) on Oct 9, 2015 at 2:28am PDT

Drum Geek tip of the day: you can use a multiband dynamics such as Izotope Ozone as a gate to kind of tighten up the sound of your drum loop. See and hear before/after. You can sort of suck out the reverb and boominess to make it snappier. Multiband helps to target the areas where the noise/reverb/etc is most prominent.

Ever wanted to have your own drum hit folders show up under Live’s Drums view? You can. If you’re like me and have different drum sounds in different folders, it’s relatively easy.
This takes a little bit of hacking and taking a look at code, but is relatively simple. Continue reading Ableton Live drum hits category hack →