Creating a dubstep bass with Ableton

A few weeks ago I found the great video tutorial “Creating a Dubstep wobble / bass sound in Ableton Live 8” made by dubspot. The tutorial shows how to create a dubstep bass in Ableton Live using the Simpler instrument.

Here is my experience with the video instructions. I have created a MIDI track and dragged the “Simpler” instrument into it. After that I downloaded a wave file from Dubspot, which is used in the tutorial, and added the sample by dragging it into the instrument. Then I have to make some settings:

• Activate “Loop” and “Filter” and select filter “Type” “BP12”
• Set the filter frequency “Freq” to 290 Hz.
• Turn filter envelop on and the “Env” field to “-20”.

We are programing a bass sound, so I have set the number of voices to one and activate the glide function. In order to get a more expressiv and more dynamic sound set the filter velocity “Vel” to about 34 % and “Attack” to 54 ms. To get a more spatial result, set the “Spread” to 35 % – this sound like a chorus.

Simpler settings for the dubstep bass example.

We are almost done, but there is one thing missing: the dubstep typical wobble sound. For this set “LFO” on, sync the LFO with ableton (press the “note” symbol), swipe 8th notes and set the LFO amount to about 20.

Simpler MIDI mappings for the dubstep bass example.

What we have done is especially useful, when you play with some parameters while playing the this bass instrumen. So I MIDI mapped some controler knobs to a few instrument parameters. In order for that select the MIDI mapping view and map this:

• “Beat” – LFO rate (beats) – LFO synced rate (useful range: 1/4 – 1/24)
• “LFO” – Filter < LFO – Filter < LFO (useful range: 0 – 24)
• “Filter” – Filter Cutoff Frequency – Filter Frequency (useful range: 30 Hz – 18.5 kHz)

MIDI mapping for the dubstep bass example.

In the end I don’t want to keep my first result from you. That is how it sounds. Bye for now.

Alexander

Advertisement