Jupiter-8 bass and lead
Roland’s Jupiter-8 is a bona fide hardware synth classic that’s been used on countless techno and house records, and it’s a firm favourite of Alex’s. He sets the cowbell track on the TR-808 to trigger the Jupiter-8’s arpeggiator input.
Alex uses a mono out from the synth so that the bass sits firmly in the centre of the mix. He records an 80-bar sequence onto an audio track in Live, tweaking the synth’s parameters – particularly the Cutoff and Resonance – as it records, creating an evolving synth bass that gives him plenty of material to play with later.
Alex next sets about creating a lead sound, auditioning a number of patches before deciding to return to the same sound as the bass part, just pitched up a few octaves. He plays it back with a slightly more complex arpeggiated chord, triggered using the same cowbell pattern from the TR-808. He high-passes this at 204Hz and attenuates the 1kHz region by a couple of dB with EQ Eight, then adds Live’s Chorus effect for stereo width.