How to Create a Sub Bass in Ableton

Sub bass is a big part of modern music production.  A hefty bottom end is the driving force behind most chart topping hits.  Even if you have a bass sound that occupies a good bit of the low-mids in your mix, it’s often beneficial to layer a sub bass underneath it.

With that being said, we can easily create a sub bass in Ableton’s Operator.

Take a listen (if you’re using cheapo PC speakers you won’t hear much)

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Step 1- Setup Oscillator A.

By default, Oscillator A  is set to a sine wave, which is ideal in this situation.

Max out your Decay and Sustain.  Drop your Coarse to 0.5.

Step 2 – Tweak Oscillator B.

If we wanted we could just use Osc A, but we’ll give our sub bass a bit of character by detuning Oscillator B.  This will give our bass that pulsing feel you hear in a lot of DnB tracks.

Set your Level to -24 dB and your Fine knob to 448.  Max out your Decay and Sustain as well.

Step 3 – Activate your Filter.

We’ll use a low pass filter to create more headroom for other sounds.  This will also ensure that we bypass any low-mids that could potentially muddy up our mix.

Choose Low 12dB for your filter type.  Set your Frequency to 61.3 Hz and your Resonance to 2.78.  Max out your Decay and Sustain.

Lastly, increase your Tone to 100%.

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Summary

If your sub bass adds too much low-end rumble to your mix, then try rolling off frequencies below 20-30 Hz.  Also, you could easily turn this sound into a sub bass kick by going back to your oscillators and reducing the sustain and decay of your envelopes.  If you want more tone or body, then experimenting with other waveforms – they should yield different results.

We hope you found this article helpful!  Check back regularly for more great info from LoopGalaxy!

 

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