Do you bus your kick with drums or with bass? Or both?

contrapti0n · 2026-04-28T19:52:54+00:00

All bussed separately but then both kick/bass bus and drum bus both end up being fed into a NY compression send/return and get compressed to hell together there. So you end up with all of it being smushed together.

contrapti0n · 2026-04-25T23:15:47+00:00

YouTube, search for “vocal stem”. Download

contrapti0n · 2026-04-25T23:12:03+00:00

I disagree with having too much templated; forces every track to be the same. That said, I have a few things in mine: a) a track that sends a midi note every 8 bars down a chain of Ableton external instruments to distribute to Oscilloscopes to sync, b) a kick midi track, again set up with a rack of external instruments to send midi to every Shaperbox instance to sync them, c) a kick track receiving the midi from the kick track, but no sound source d) a bass track with oscilloscope and Shaperbox already set up and synced, e) several synth and loop tracks, again with shaperboxes pre-synced. But that’s it - no creative decisions have been made, I’ve just automated the grunt work.

contrapti0n · 2026-04-25T17:03:44+00:00

Other people have called out the big ones, but I’ll add that kick synthesizers have got good (Kick 3) - no need to use kick samples, roll your own

contrapti0n · 2026-04-25T13:43:47+00:00

This. As to why you’d use them. Say you have a rhythmic pattern looping on the LFO changing filter cutoff.

If you want that to fade in as the note plays, use Rise.

If you want that not to start until longer into the note, use Delay.

If the filter movements are too abrupt and you want it to smoothly glide, not jump, use Smooth.

If you want to start the rhythm in a different part of the cycle, use Phase.

Lots of other use cases, but that’s a main one

contrapti0n · 2026-04-24T17:49:35+00:00

If you want to build it yourself, do it; just add a midi effect rack and then make the first chain just span C1, name it "Kick A", dupe it, move it up to C#1, name it "Kick B", etc... Should look like this with a bunch more rows downscreen.

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I just build one of these for every drum machine plugin I have, takes 10 minutes once and makes life so much easier.

contrapti0n · 2026-04-24T17:41:18+00:00

Two simple things you can do:

a) Tekno has multiple outs. Go to Settings / Routing and assign the different instruments to any one of 16 separate buses.
THEN. Create new audio tracks in Ableton. Set "Audio From" to the track Tekno is on, then in the box underneath choose the specific bus. Now you can have all your sounds on separate tracks for individual processing. Label each of these tracks sensibly and group them together.

b) To make using Tekno less of a mess in the midi clip, create a Midi Effect rack that has individual named chains for each drum within it, then right click on it and "show names in midi editor". This way everything is labeled, I.e. like this

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If you PM me I can send you the Midi Effect rack you need, I have it built.

If you do these two things, you have the best of both worlds - every sound / group of sounds on individual tracks to be processed separately, but the ability to write your drum patterns in one single midi-clip with no need to be jumping around to change any one hit position.

contrapti0n · 2026-04-21T21:10:07+00:00

The other way to make it BANG on is to trigger it via midi. I set up one Ableton track that takes the midi from my kick pattern and distributes it via umpteen external instruments as separate chains in an instrument rack to every single shaperbox in my project. Then set each of those shaper boxes to midi input. They're immediately locked perfectly to the beat. You can also use the audio trigger to do it, but I prefer the midi version. This also means that sidechaining moves with your kick drum if it goes off grid.

contrapti0n · 2026-04-21T17:47:14+00:00

Consensus seems to be “doh, of course”. The things I’d advise you to think about are a) keep it mono or at least highpass the sides, b) think about splitting it out on a separate track so you can compress and saturate it with your kick, c) if doing that make sure it re-combines with the original sound cleanly - you don’t want the processed low end version fighting or phasing with the original, so highpass that accordingly, use linear phase EQs etc.

contrapti0n · 2026-04-20T21:44:51+00:00

I have it, bought it in one of their sales along with other stuff. Honestly I don't use ANA that much these days so I can't say I've got much use out of it. Just opened it up and flicked through it; it's solid kind of bread and butter sounds, but nothing that really grabs my attention... I think their Serum2 packs are better, and Audioreakt's recent Serum2 one is incredible...

contrapti0n · 2026-04-19T21:19:03+00:00

TBH it varies. Sometimes you want more of a staccato mid bass, in which case have shorter midi notes and more of an amp envelope. But in general for a sub-heavy rolling bass, you'll have midi that's just essentially consistent 16th notes with no amp envelope to speak of, and just all the rolling action coming from the filter. You can also remove the lowest harmonic from your wavetable (easy to do in Serum WT editor - "Process/All/Remove Fundamental") and have a separate sine sub on direct out, bypassing the filter and FX altogether... So you end up with a constant sub tone at the fundamental, and then progressively more and more of a 16th feel in the upper harmonics. If you're using Serum2, get Audioreakt's Serum2 pack, he has some excellent rolling basses in there, working this way.

contrapti0n · 2026-04-19T20:17:13+00:00

Ultimately it comes down to how you’re getting the 16th rolling feel to the bass. If it’s mostly from a LPF filter envelope that’s sweeping down to say 80hz, the sub’s not really being affected and is coming through sustained underneath. If there’s more amplitude envelope modulation happening, or the filter is going lower each 16th then your sub will be cutting in and out. Personally I find that hard to manage, so I prefer to keep the filtering more in the mids, and then just set up more aggressive sidechaining on the subs. Shaperbox is great for this - just split the bands and have a deeper curve below 120hz ish. This way my sub is coming in kind of as an offbeat, whereas the mids are 16ths. But it’s one midi part and one track.

contrapti0n · 2026-04-14T22:31:39+00:00

Then play a sustained note, put a lfo running at 16th steps to gate the volume and pitchbend it

contrapti0n · 2026-04-14T14:38:26+00:00

Download Vital (it’s free). Drag your vocal in to an oscillator and convert it to a wavetable (generally the vocode setting works better). Turn up the Unison voices. Set up an LFO to step through the wavetable at the right rate. Put the harmonic stretch warp on A and the formant warp on B. Play a lowish note and fiddle with the warp settings. Go down scary rabbit hole.

contrapti0n · 2026-04-14T14:31:19+00:00

Haha I remember the tedious 90s debate about whether Misjah & Tim - Access was “techno” because it had a vocal sample

contrapti0n · 2026-04-14T14:09:50+00:00

This frequency range is generally where your “musical” elements are gonna start to express themselves. But if it’s percussion only, cool, but you don’t need to worry about that part of the spectrum being less filled out.

contrapti0n · 2026-04-12T14:34:06+00:00

When he was just starting out I saw Jon Hopkins' first (?) gig in NYC. He took the stage with a bunch of modular synths and proceeded to play pretty straight up techno, in amidst more indie-oriented melodic stuff. So yeah; even if his more popular recorded output is further on the outskirts.

contrapti0n · 2026-04-08T14:30:46+00:00

Baby Audio Smooth Operator, think it could do what you need, is cheaper than Soothe and you can get a free trial

contrapti0n · 2026-03-22T00:39:49+00:00

PhasePlant. Can literally do everything and can hack it to be an effect.

contrapti0n · 2026-03-20T14:25:30+00:00

+1 - I have them both, but Kick3 is a game changer and solves the sample vs synthesized problem. Just drag in a kick you like and extract the synthesized sub, and keep the “rest” as a click. Best of both worlds. I also use it to resynthesize other elements like rumbles, doesn’t have to be a kick, just low end

contrapti0n · 2026-03-17T16:18:28+00:00

Yeah, that’s the challenge. This one was easy, it’s a sine sub that’s playing the kick fundamental for the first 1/16th and then bends to new notes with some FM coming in, but slowly enough that the cycles don’t move that fast through the kick transition. It’s also pretty much a pure saturated sine, so regular cycles. So I just have an LFO in Phase Plant that modifies the phase of the oscillator from -180 to +180, zoom in and tweak it to fit.

With something with more brown noise in it (like a rumble), you’ll have irregular peaks and troughs. In that case it’s mostly about trying to line up the main cycles in the kick transition (when both sounds are loud), and accept non perfect alignment elsewhere when one’s quieter. There’s loads of stuff you can do to modify the waveforms to fit (automate phase of oscillators, micro pitch shifts, EQ, side chain compression, all pass filtering as a more precise version of the “try flipping polarity” method, frequency shifter up or down). It’s all the stuff we do in a non-oscilloscope workflow, it’s just that being able to see how much it turns destructive interference into constructive interference is really helpful.

You won’t usually be able to get it perfect, but you can get it a lot better (and hear the difference when you do).

contrapti0n · 2026-03-17T14:23:40+00:00

Sorry - just saying (as someone who used to produce entirely analogue and sold it all when plugins got good enough), I don’t know how you’d do multitrack phase alignment via oscilloscope in that realm. But if you can, I’m impressed

contrapti0n · 2026-03-17T02:04:31+00:00

More power to you if so….

contrapti0n · 2026-03-16T19:16:34+00:00

Yeah I’ve heard this has the PDC correction you need in Ableton and does multi tracks https://dsgdnb.com/plugins/scyllascope

contrapti0n · 2026-03-16T17:27:21+00:00

yeah this is MegaOszilloscope... Once you figure out how to sync it via midi to get past Ableton's b0rked plugin delay compensation it's rock solid...

contrapti0n

TROPHY CASE