BETTER BASS AND KICKS CREATE THE PERFECT LOW END IN ABLETON LIVE

Welcome to MusicTech’s Ableton Live 2019 Focus! This is a special issue completely dedicated to your favourite DAW and in it, we have a dozen workshops and several features, all designed to improve your Live music production.

The focus in this particular Focus (ahem) is on perfect mixing and production, and as well as Ableton expert Martin Delaney’s excellent workshops (starting on p32), we have included a lot of more general production articles. These include two features on producing perfect bass and kicks, on pages 30 and 52 respectively. In this first tutorial, then, we’ve decided to expand on these two general features and show you how to produce better bass and kick sounds specifically in Live 10, using many of the tools and sounds in the software to perfect your bottom end.

Over the next 10 pages, we will home in on both the bass and kick, to show you how to perfect each sound and then, importantly, how to marry them together.

HOW LOW IS LOW?

Pretty much every genre of music utilises at least one type of bass sound and a solid kick as part of the beats. Rock music will use a real bass guitar and EDM will, most often, use a sample or synthetic one, generated either by a software plug-in synth, or a similar sound from a hardware module. Similarly, for beats, acoustic or rock tracks get their kicks from proper drum kits, while in dance music, those beats will come from hardware drum machines and software samples or synthetically generated kicks. However, whatever style of music you make, this workshop should reveal the principles that you can use.

So, whether you make pumping techno or acoustic folk, you should be able to pick up some low-end production advice from the next nine pages of workshops. The reason we have lumped both bass and kicks together in this tutorial is simply because they are often the foundation