In this Ableton Operator Bass Tutorial we look at 3 tips to warm up our sub bass. These techniques will give the bass more presence and vibe as well as help it to better fit with our existing sounds.
When we talk about adding colour, distortion or warmth to a sound we are essentially saying’ “add more frequencies in the form of harmonics or noise”. As a sub bass is often a simple waveform such as a sine wave, adding more frequencies will give the bass some much needed character.
Our first technique involves manually adding harmonics using Ableton’s Operator synth. This gives us a huge amount of control over the final sound as we can the volume and number of harmonics to taste. It’s always best to make these adjustments whilst listening to the bass in context with the rest of your track.
Our second technique is to add some tube warmth using the Ableton Dynamic Tube effect. I prefer algorithm ‘C’ for this job as it is a little smoother and free from the harsher edge presented by the other algorithms.
We round out the video by using one of the new analogue filter designs introduced in Ableton Live 9.5. We drive the filter hard to introduce a nice warmth and thickness to the sub bass.
Although we have used these techniques on sub bass you can achieve great results on anything from leads to pads – give it a try!
These techniques add that extra fatness you often hear in Tech House, Deep House and Techno genres but again there is no reason not to use them for any other genre of electronic music.
The next Ableton Live tutorial will be posted at the same time next week.
