Generate new musical ideas in Ableton Live

PROBLEM: How can I ensure that individual tracks maintain clarity within a bass-heavy mix?

In modern bass music, sometimes it can be challenging to keep the mix clean when we are working with complex sounds that sit across wide frequency ranges. This can result in an undefined stereo image and details getting lost. We can take care of these issues even during the sound design process while we are still crafting the sound. For that, Live’s Instrument Rack is a perfect tool to split sounds by frequency bands in order to process them differently. This can be extremely useful for mixing purposes, but also opens doors to a wide range of creative sound design and modulation options of the different layers.

In this example we will create a big growling Reese bass sound! We will start off with a simple Reese created in Analogue which we group into an Instrument Rack to a single Chain.

01

Create a simple Reese bass sound then group it into an Instrument Rack. Duplicate the chain and rename the first one “mid” and the second one “low”.This will allow us to apply different processing to the two different chains.

02

Now we can separate the two chains by frequencies. Drop an EQ8 on both chains. For the “mid” chain apply a low cut around 100Hz and for the “low” chain apply a high cut around 100Hz. Then we can apply further independent processing to the chains. Try Saturation, Erosion with wide noise, Chorus or Reverb on the “mid” chain. Saturation and Utility switched to mono on the low chain.

03

For further separation let’s insert a Multiband Dynamics and EQ8 in mid-side mode. This will allow us to further control the frequency bands in terms of stereo image and dynamics. We can also insert an Auto-Filter to give movement across the arrangement later.

04

Instrument Racks provide Macros for easy access to mapped parameters. Map the Dry/ Wet control of the Saturator, Chorus and Reverb. We can group the Multiband Dynamics, EQ8, Auto-Filter with the Inst Rack, putting them all in another Inst Rack’s single chain. Now we can map devices’ existing Macros/parameters outside the Initial Inst Rack to the new Inst Rack’s Macros.

05

Now we can go ahead and automate the Macros to provide movement and more interesting textures to the sound throughout the arrangement.