Playing live bass through ableton

[Spore Sounds]

Hi everyone

I'm pretty new to ableton and new to this forum. Been playing with ableton for a couple months and am starting to get a pretty decent hold on it.
I'm starting a live looping project with myself and a drummer. I'm primarily playing live bass with a lot of stomp box effects, and ableton synths.

The problem Im having is I'm loosing a good amount of tone in my bass and it's making some of my effects sound weird. Right now my current signal chain is Bass>buffered effects loop>effects pedals>back to effects loop>Saffire pro 40 interface>Ableton>saffire pro out>buffered preamp>Bass amp.
The amp is an 800 watt Mark Bass head thats connected to a 4x10 cabnet
Is there a better way to set this up. Right now I've tried compensating by adding lives EQ's and Amp modelers. The EQ's helped some but the amp modelers seamed to distort the signal too much. I'm not really trying to use much in the way of live effects since I have quite a few of my own analog bass effect.

Thanks guys!

[JoshG567]

If I'm using my bass and my amp and just want Live to loop with or add FX I'll just put my interface in my FX loop. If the laptop dies I just turn the mix back to 100% dry and play without.

Don't use ampsim when you're going into an amp, there's no point. I don't know why else your tone would be fucked up, but if it were me I'd troubleshoot methodically by eliminating everything in the signal chain and adding them one at a time until I found the problem.

What do your levels look like coming into Live from the interface? If it's running really hot you need to back it off to the best SNR you can get w/o clipping.

Another thing to consider is that latency may not be trivial. Run at the highest sample rate and lowest buffers you can, and be sure to minimize/eliminate device parameters that increase latency, like compressor/limiter lookaheads, etc. If it's just you and a drummer live, your drummer may get annoyed with you being latent.

[Spore Sounds]

Great I'll try that. Hadn't thought of sending it through the effects loop on the amp. That might help to smooth things. The tone isn't terrible and levels are fine, just sounds a little weak, but I would think sending it through the loop first might give it a bit more power. And I like the idea of still being able to play if something went wrong with the computer.

I'll check all those latency settings next time I get a chance too, it does feel like I might have just a little latency.

Thanks for your help!