1. Doing all the compression/limiting on the master While master compression and limiting is great for making a track loud, too much of it will kill the dynamics of a track. You can often achieve more natural sounding results if you compress in stages. Try grouping or creating bus tracks for different kinds of instruments and compressing them. A common example is putting a compressor on a drum bus to even out the volumes of drums before the master. Try also dealing with transients on loud drum hits (like kick and snare) before the master (for example by limiting them)...

1. Mixing on monitors in a non-treated room Before you start mixing a track you need to be able to hear it in enough detail. The problem with studio monitors is that often producers buy them before investing in room treatment. With bad acoustics you’re not going to hear your track the same way you would in a treated room. If you can’t afford room treatment a temporary solution could be to buy good studio headphones. With headphones you’re not dependent on your room’s acoustics. I recommend that you still use monitors to check what your mix sounds like on...

We had a lot of questions on how the compressor actually works, so we decided to make a small series of videos covering the functionalities from the perspective of the Ableton Live built-in compressor.     Learn more about compression in the mixing stage: NEW PML 5h+ Course: Mixing A Track From Scratch in Ableton (with stock effects)     Keywords: mixing, compressor, how to use a compressor, how does a compressor work

Definition of Dithering Dithering or to dither means adding noise to the audio signal. Noise is being added on purpose to trade a little bit of low-level hiss for a great deal of distortion. The distortion is first caused by using a fixed number of bits (e.g. 16 bits) to represent our sample points as accurate as possible (in the analogue world, there are infinite or continuous sample points available, whereas they are finite (discrete) in the digital world).  So, in our DAW for example, "dithering is done by adding noise of a level less than the least-significant bit before...