Ableton Forum

hey y'all,

I finally picked up a good soundcard (ultralite mk3) with acceptable latency so I've started running my bass guitar straight into my computer. Eventually I want to use Live to loop and process my bass guitar's input in a live setting, but that's a ways off. At this point I'm trying to get a good sound, and ideally I'd like to use only live's native effects. So far I've messed with gate, compression, and eq and it's definitely an improvement but it still sounds fairly flat and kind of amateur. I realize this might be kind of a specific thing, but really I'm interested in talking to anybody who runs their bass (or even a regular guitar) through Ableton about the whole process in general, how to get a better tone out of it, etc.

Thanks everybody!

i personally don't like compressed bass sound.

I think the tone will depend on your bass quite a bit.


But one tip i like is to add a small amount of distortion to the bass. Warms it up a bit.

get Trilogy, sounds great.

You'd do best getting a bass amp sim (IK Multimedia). DI bass can lack character.
Or record your bass amp.
There are a lot of instruments in the bass synth section in insruments. Extract the synth and try the many effects out.

Thank you friends! I'm going to see if I can get a demo of that bass amp sim.

maybe just try mic ing up your bass cabinet with one or 2 shure SM 57's
or try using psp vintage warmer and use a tight sum (2:1-4:1) compression with a touch of drive.
or use the live compressor and add the saturate into the signal
also try audio damge fuzz plug in its free, this can add some grit.
also it highly depends on the genre you are recording for

I had tried Ampeg SVX in the past but I gave it another go and that's exactly what I was looking for! I just messed with the presets for a half hour and it sounds so good, thanks again for the recommendation. For some reason it even feels way tighter in terms of response and latency than without a modeling plugin, so whatever's causing that is awesome too.

GTR from waves is not too bad as a guitar amp simulator, maybe it's the same for bass ? Don't forget to make your track mono, using ableton's utility device !