Addicted to Bass

I've been experimenting over the last couple of days with sounds for my next track, in particular, how to go about getting that nasty dirty bass sound, and until now I've not really been happy with anything that I've been able to produce in Ableton Live. Until I found a couple of free plugins that seem to really complement each other:

• The first is Lanstarr's StarrSynth2.2 Bass Edition, which with only a few knob tweaks, seems to be able to create some amazing monstrous bass sounds.
• The second is de la Mancha's Dirtbox2, which is a bit like the saturator included with Ableton, but is much better at making anything that passes through it nice and gritty. You should also check out some of the other de la Mancha plugins, as they're all pretty high quality, in particular check out the SubHuman and SubFreak plugins which are useful for layering under other bass sounds for a much fuller feel.

By playing about with these 2 plugins in combo (with a limiter tacked on the end of the chain to stop things getting a bit too heavy handed on my poor monitor speakers, as the results can be pretty big) I managed to achieve some really nasty bass patches. I've put a few in this zip file for anyone else struggling to make bass sounds in Ableton Live 6. Download them here and put them into your library. (You'll need both the aforementioned plugins installed, of course).