While working with the bass sound, I was starting to feel the Resonator settings were a little bit too abrasive. If you have the Glue Compressor from the Live 9 Suite, that’s a good place to start…Īs we’re adding more elements to our track, we’ve got to make sure everything sounds good alongside everything else. This is perfectly adequate as a clinical compression tool, although that’s one area where I think third-party plug-ins or even hardware can step in and do the job better, for those times when you want a compressor that purposely adds some character to the sound. We finished off the bass track with Live’s Compressor. You might notice that the sine wave part of the bass sound doesn’t react much to the filter, but that’s normal – sines are not so responsive compared to other more complex waveforms. And remember: each envelope can be a different length. If you don’t like the restrictions and mouse-work of drawing these envelopes, be aware that you can record them in real time if you’re using a suitable hardware controller.Īlso I can’t stress enough the importance of unlinking clip envelopes from the clip length. It depends on what genre you’re working with, but automated filters can be a huge factor in the mix. We use clip envelopes to create repetitive movement of the Auto Filter controls it makes our bass sound a bit more evolving and interesting. This is because we plan to add other instruments, and sonically there won’t be any room for them if we have a bass sound that’s riddled with effects and covering a huge frequency range. Lucky us! Maybe we’ll come back and use them later.Īs I mention in the tutorial, it’s important to resist the temptation to make a huge bass sound right now. It makes it possible to build long, sustaining notes by loop and crossfading short samples, but on this occasion we don’t need those controls. Simpler Sampler Simpler is a very powerful sampler, although it has a user-friendly interface. It’s the same reason we set the Simpler instruments to 1 voice each, to avoid overlaps that will affect the bass part. When you’re working with MIDI programming, a lot of mixing problems can be fixed at the programming stage. For reasons of simplicity, we’re pairing it with our square wave sound, but there’s no reason why a sub couldn’t be on a track of its own and subject to a whole other round of editing and effect processing.Īfter drawing in the notes in our bass clip, we went back to shorten the bass note in our sliced drum rack from last time to make sure it didn’t overlap with the new bass part. It can be almost inaudible in the mix at certain times. We’re using a transposed sine wave to create a sub bass – a low bass fundamental tone which fattens up the bottom end. This can be a bit overbearing, but we’re only using two today, so we’ll deal with that issue another time, and there are various tactics we can use to specify which sounds play at what times. When you connect a MIDI keyboard or use your computer keyboard to play those sounds, you’re going to get a massive sound because all of the chains will play at once. Impressive enough, but then bear in mind that you can have 128 racks inside another rack, so you can quickly end up with thousands of chains buried deep within your rack. We’re using two chains in our rack – that’s two instruments playing together – but you can have up to 128 chains in a rack. In many ways they’re similar to drum racks, which we’ve already encountered. We’re spending more time working with instrument racks as this is a great way to build deep synth sounds that would otherwise require complex routing across several tracks.