Here’s a quick run down of how to make a techno FM bass stab in Ableton. It can be used in tribal house too. It’s a dark bass stab, made in Ableton’s Operator, it is frequency modulated, detuned and cut short with envelopes. And it has a sub bass oscillator built in to beef up the low end of the bass. There’s plenty of drive / distortion too. I go into more info below, and you can download the free Ableton rack in the Downloads section at the end.
See also: our free Free Ableton Operator Presets: FM House Basses, Free Ableton Operator Presets: Sub Basses, and our full Operator Tutorial. You can find all the free Ableton presets here. Also: Free Ableton Wavetable Drum n Bass Reese Presets.
How To Make An FM Techno Bass In Ableton’s Operator
Here’s all the midi effects, instruments and audio effects I’ve used to make this FM bass rack and how they affect the sound:
Here we are using 3 operator FM, with an added sub bas oscillator. So Oscillator A is the sub oscillator. Then C and D frequency modulate B to give it a rich harmonic sound. C has fine-tune up a bit so it is ‘off’ which makes the bass a bit nastier / harsher.
The filter is set to have drive on it and shaper to distort the bass and add harmonics. There’s a filter envelope too, with a short decay for a short and tight bass.
Then the bass is driven more with an overdrive unit.
It’s delayed rhythmically with an Echo. Then a Drum Buss for more distortion.
Then a resonant filter with an LFO to move it, which give it a wet movement, synched to the beat.
The Macro Controls For The FM Bass
Here’s what the Macro controls do:
Time: this cuts short, or elongates all envelopes in Operator
Osc-C: the level of FM from oscillator C
Osc-D: the level of FM from oscillator D
Filter Freq: the filter frequency
Filter Res: the filter resonance
Filter Res: more distortion, this time at the filter.
Over Drive: another distortion to drive the sound.
Drum Buss: more distortion, after the delays on the Echo unit.
Techno FM In Ableton Live – Video:
Here’s a video tutorial and run down of the rack on our youtube channel….
Please subscribe to the youtube if you haven’t yet: youtube.com/@studiobrootle
Downloads
You can download this pack by subscribing to the mailing list here, you’ll get a link to download it:
