> Step by step

1. Mixing beats and breaks in Ableton Live

1 Begin by setting the project tempo to 174bpm and dragging Kick. wav, Snare.wav, Closed hat.wav, Ride.wav, Crash.wav and Angry break.wav onto separate audio tracks. Set up a cycle loop around the bar containing the parts, and turn all of them down to -6dB so that they don’t clip the master.

2 In their raw form, these elements sound like a big mess! The easiest way to get a handle on what we’re working with is to mute everything apart from the kick and snare. When we do this, we can hear that the snare is way too loud for the kick.

3 Drop the level of the snare track down to -13dB. We can see from the ‘uneven’ level meters on the kick and snare tracks that both are in stereo. We want the kick and snare to sit at the dead centre of the mix, so drag Live’s Utility effect onto the kick track and set its Width parameter to 0%.

4 Do the same on the snare track. Next, add an EQ Eight to the kick track. Set the first band to 12dB low-cut mode, and bring up the Freq knob until you’ve removed the excess weight from the low end. A setting of about 80Hz gives us a lighter, less stompy sound that won’t interfere with a bassline as much.

5 Do the same on the snare track, but this time set the low-cut filter to 130Hz. The snare could also do with some more high-end crack – we could layer it up with another sound, but using a high-shelf EQ to boost 2dB at 4kHz works too. (Audio: EQed kick and snare)

6 Unmute the closed hi-hat track and add another EQ Eight. Use a 12dB low-cut band at 1.6kHz to take out the messy lows. The top end of the hi-hat is a little harsh, so use a bell shape to take off 2dB at 10kHz, and a 12dB high cut to take out everything above 18kHz.