one of the great heroes of sounddesign for film is walter murch. he's primarily known for his work on 'the godfather' and 'apocalypse now', but my personal favorite is george lucas' 'thx 1138', from 1971. it's quite an experience to just listen to the audio of this film. murch is also known for inventing all kinds of techniques to manipulate sound. i'll explain one and show how we can replicate it in ableton live.

throw those 2 terms at google and within seconds you'll find yourself in the middle of one of the many wars on the intertoobz. on one side you'll find people who claim that live's summing bus sounds crap compared to for instance apple logic's. on the other side are people who claim that this is simply not true. or that, if it is true, it doesn't matter. for those who don't know what this is all about: summing happens when 2 or more signals are mixed together. the master channel of your daw is the most obvious example. if your summing bus is bad, every track you do suffers from it.