Ardour Mixing Tutorial: Adding Tracks, Routing and Applying Effects

This is an important tutorial for Ardour which is a Linux-based digital audio workstation. In audio mixing, you will be applying several effects that could improve the clarity and presence of your tracks. Example of these effects are EQ, compression, etc. This tutorial already assumes you have completed recording/tracking your tracks and that the only problem is how to start mixing it. Also this assumes you have a fully working installation of Ardour in your Linux or Mac operating system. This means everything should be working including JACK in Ardour. These are the steps:

Prepare your Tracks and Create Ardour Sessions

1.) Prepare your recorded tracks. For the purpose of illustration, download these test audio wav files that will be used in this tutorial.

2.) Extract the zip file. Inside the ardoursamples folder, you will find two wav files namely chorus bass.wav and kickdrum.wav. The format of this audio wav files is 24-bit/48KHz which is compatible with Ardour.

3.) Launch Ardour.
4.) Under “New Session”, name it as ardourmixingtutorial to save the project and click “New”.
5.) Let’s import these two wav tracks to Ardour for mixing. Go to “Session” – “Import”. Under “Add Existing Audio”, locate the kickdrum.wav and then click OK.
6.) Also import chorus bass.wav to your mixing session in Ardour.
7.) Move these two tracks at the beginning of the session. This is how it looks like after moving the tracks to the start:

8.) Right click over kick drum audio wave, go to “kickdrum” – “multi-duplicate” – and set the number of duplications to 7. This will duplicate the kick drum clip 7 times. This can be very useful for beat/loop generation.

9.) Now right click also on chorus bass audio, go to “chorus bass” – “multi-duplicate” – set the number of duplications into 1. This is how it looks like with sample clips duplicated in Ardour session:

10.) Save the changes you have implemented in your Ardour session. Go to “Session” – “Save”.

Controlling the Peaks on Master Fader

11.) Try playing the session, you should hear the music out of your studio monitors. If you cannot hear any audio output; make sure you properly route your tracks to Ardour master channel. Go to “Window” – “Show Mixer”, and go to “Master”. Make sure the master input and master output looks like this:

12.) If you can hear some audio, look at your master fader. This is how it looks like:

As you can see, the master audio clips at +2.6dB. In digital audio, the maximum peak allowed is only +0dB; beyond that its called clipping (as shown it’s red) and can cause distortion. So you need to decrease the volume in the master fader until it will hover around -6dB to -3dB (put more headroom to your mix).

Based on the screenshot, the master fader was adjusted from 0 to -6dB, so that the peak on the master will hover around -6dB to -3dB (-3.5dB on the screenshot).

Adding Effects to your Mix

Read this tutorial on how to add, use and install Ardour plugins in Ubuntu. Follow the procedure in that tutorial and add “Triple Band Parametric” on on the pre-fader section of kick drum and chorus bass tracks. To confirm if you have correctly added the plugin, go to Windows – Show Mixer. You should see the Triple Band parametric effects plugin added on both kick drum and chorus bass track. Screenshot (enclosed in dotted yellow box):

Configuring EQ settings in Mixing

1.) Let’s apply the following EQ setting:

Kick drum:

Low shelf -9dB at 75Hz
Boost +3dB at 100Hz, Q=1.4
Cut -9dB at 400Hz, Q=1.4

Chorus bass:

Cut -9dB at 100Hz, Q=1.4
Boost +3dB at 400Hz, Q=1.4

The objective of that setting is to establish clarity between the kick drum and bass drum. The EQ settings also depends on the nature of the material. For more details, read this tutorial for more EQ settings used during mixing.

To implement the above settings. Go to “Window” – “Show Mixer”. Double click “Triple band parametric” under “kickdrum” track. Move the sliders of the “Controls” to assign a particular setting in terms of dB, frequency and Q (bandwidth) or double click on the values to type the setting. This is the EQ setting applied on kickdrum based on the above settings:

Now do the same for chorus bass and implement the above settings, this is how the triple band parametric settings would look like:

You can find more details here about using Tri-band parametric w/ shelves in Ardour.

2.) Try to play the session. Using your accurate studio monitoring system, listen properly if it’s the right EQ settings. Feel free to tweaked further until you obtained maximum clarity. Make sure that both the channel and master fader level does not clip after EQ adjustment. If it does clip, either lower the +dB settings in EQ or the specific channel fader itself.

Adding and Configuring Compressors in the Mix

1.) Supposing you would like to add a compressor to the bass guitar. Go to Window – Show Mixer. Right click on the empty region below “Triple band parametric” under “chorus bass” track. Go to “New Plugin” – “Plugin Manager”. Find “SC1” which is a compressor, click “Add” and finally click “Insert Plugin”. You should then see SC1 added next to Triple band parametric, screenshot:

2.) To configure the SC1 compressor, double click “SC1” under “chorus bass”. Supposing you would implement the following compressor settings for the bass:

Threshold= -20dB
Ratio: 6 is to 1
Attack time: 40ms
Release time: 80ms

This is how it looks after implementing it on the SC1:

Aside from compressors, you can as well apply a lot of effects supported by Ardour. For example reverb, delay, echo, panning, etc.

Finally Mix Down your Track in Ardour…

If your mix sounds good, you can render a mix down into a single file ready for mastering. To do this:

1.) Move the “End” markers near to the last section of the track. If you do not move this, you will have very LONG silence at the end of the track. This end marker is a blue line with yellow pin on the top. After moving this to the last part of the track, it would look like this:

2.) Go to Session – Export – Export Session to Audiofile, configure it as follows:

The format of the mixdown will be 24-bit/48KHz.

3.) Finally click Export. You will see the message “Congratulations on your session export”. You can decide to donate to Ardour as a one time donation or select “Ask about this the next time I export” if you are not yet ready. Click OK.

4.) The mixdown audio file will be placed in the path:
“/home/yourusername/Desktop/ardourmixingtutorial/export”
Note: If you have your Ardour project saved in your Linux desktop.

5.) If you want to see how your mixdown waveform looks like, right click and open it in Audacity (close Ardour first). This is how it looks like:

You can then provide this audio file to a mastering engineer for your track to be professionally mastered. Ardour can be very difficult to use for a beginner, but this tutorial illustrates all the basic concepts of audio mixing in a simple manner.

Content last updated on June 27, 2012