Ableton Live 12 Intro: what you get

What 16 tracks is enough for

Sixteen tracks is enough for most beats and most simple songs, with room to spare.

A beat can give the kick, snare, hats and percussion their own tracks, which makes them much easier to mix, and still have space for bass, chords, a lead, samples and a vocal. A song with a band setup fits too. Drums on a few tracks, bass, two guitars or keys, a lead vocal with a double and a couple of backing parts comes in under 16.

You start to feel the limit on dense arrangements, orchestral layers, or recorded songs where you keep many takes on their own tracks. Bouncing finished parts to audio and removing the originals buys you space, but if you do it every session, you've outgrown Intro.

Intro has 16 scenes, the same as Lite. That is enough for laying out the sections of a song in Session View, and it becomes a limit only if you collect a lot of clip ideas.

Mixing in Intro with Channel EQ and EQ Three

Intro has everything you need to make a clean mix. Channel EQ, EQ Three and Saturator all come with it, and every EQ guide on this site gives a Channel EQ setting written for Intro.

Channel EQ is the one to use for mixing. It has a high pass you can switch on, a low shelf, one mid band you can sweep from 120 Hz to 7.5 kHz, and a high shelf. That one mid band is the main thing to plan around. Spend it on the biggest problem in each part, which is usually the low mid cut. If a part needs a second move in the middle of the range, like a presence boost on a vocal, add a second Channel EQ after the first. Our vocal guide does exactly that.

The high pass on Channel EQ is fixed, not sweepable, and sits around 80 Hz. That suits vocals, guitars and snares well. Leave it off on bass and kick, since it would take the weight out of them, as our settings for both say.

EQ Three is for big moves rather than fine mixing. Its kill switches drop a whole band out at once, which works for builds and DJ style transitions. For careful EQ on a part, Channel EQ is the better choice.

Saturator adds harmonics, which is useful for warming a vocal or helping a clean bass read on small speakers. Use it lightly, and listen at the same level with it on and off.

Plan your two returns. Intro gives you 2 return tracks, so put a reverb on one and a delay on the other, set them fully wet, and use the sends. The free mix kit's template is built inside Intro's limits and comes with its returns set up, so it is a quick way to see how this works.

What you'll miss first

EQ Eight is often the first thing you miss. It comes with Standard and Suite, not Intro. With eight bands of any shape in one device, it makes every move in our guides at once, where Intro needs one or two Channel EQs. You can make clean mixes without it, it just takes more devices.

Return tracks come next. Two returns cover one reverb and one delay, but if you want a short room on the drums and a longer hall on the vocal, you need a third. Standard has 12.

Tracks run out on bigger projects. Standard and Suite have no track limit.

Scenes can matter too, since Standard and Suite remove the scene limit as well. If you sketch most of your ideas as clips in Session View, you may hit the scene limit before the track limit, so count how many scenes your usual project uses before you decide.

The number of devices matters too, as you learn. Intro has 27 audio effects and 8 instruments, Standard has 36 and 12, and Suite has 59 and 21. If tutorials keep using devices you don't have, that gap is the reason.

Where our kit fits

The free mix kit works in Intro. Every device in it comes with Intro, and the template uses 12 tracks, which fits inside Intro's 16. The Vocal Chain rack is built from Channel EQ, Compressor, Saturator, Delay, Reverb and Utility, with eight knobs that turn the moves our vocal guide describes.

If you upgrade to Standard or Suite later, the kit works the same there. Nothing in it needs EQ Eight, so you won't lose anything by starting in Intro.