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).

Chimpanzees without cause

Well, that's the first night over and done with! Despite the fact that the students had all gone home for the Summer, and it was pissing it down, therefore it was dead in town, we had a good crowd in, and got down to some funky tunes all night :) I was going to try and record my set, along with the live section with Dom on the bass, but unfortunately, due to the club setup, there was nowhere to plug my miniDisc recorder in :( It has to be said though, Dom was amazing on the Bass - I'm hoping to get a bongo player for the next party we do :) And after all the stressing over the fact that the helium for the balloons had not been delivered, Naomi (bless her cottons) ran all the way across town with a bunch of balloons and filled them up at the Hard Rock Cafe. :) Click the picture below to see some highlights from the night:

Ruforia UK 21 06 07

Race to the Bass

Yesterday I spent most of the day practicing with Dom for Thursday. He's going to be playing the bass live along with a segment of my set at Ruforia on Thursday. We've managed to get a pretty decent set worked out, and he's an amazing bass player - I really want to try and include a live element every time we do a Ruforia night - I always think it makes it that much more interesting from a clubber's point of view.

After that, Justin and Arron arrived, so we played Wii sports - it's pretty amazing with just one controller, but add a couple more into the mix, and it's seriously the most amazing thing you can do to your TV :)

To have a listen to Dom playing the bass, click play in the player below.