Today I'm going to show you how to make a Roland's TB 303 acid baseline from scratch, using just the
stock plugins in Ableton Live. You can download the patch and the rest of the track completely
free below this video and without further ado, let's hop into the DAW and get it done!
It's the Roland TB 303 bass machine that i'm going to be replicating classic techno acid sound, and this
is something that Charlotte de Witte (is that how you pronounce her name?), she uses this sound and
you know loads of techno artists do. So, let's get a little riff on the go. I'm going to use the analog
synth in Ableton in the nature of doing everything with stock plug-ins and let's have a look at what
is going on. So, the 303, the TB 303 they are very expensive now but they are monophonic synths, so
the first thing I need to do is turn it to mono, and before I tweak with the sound let's just...
let's just get the rhythm and the melody written down. So, if we remember, when we looked at the kick,
we see the fundamental frequency was about A.
Basically, I think it was about 53 hertz, was it? Let's have another look.
Yeah, so it's about... If you look, it's got the hertz and then underneath the actual note on
the keyboard that it is so 54 hertz is A. So, I'm going to write this little riff in the key of
A, so it all sounds nice and in tune, well as in tune as you'd want industrial techno to sound.
i'm just going to do a little simple riff,
and I want it to sound kind of minor because techno is often in a minor key.
Cool! Okay, I know it's not great but it'll serve for the purposes of this tutorial,
and I'm just going to loop that and now let's work on this sound. So, what I'm going to do is firstly
I'm going to reduce the ... sorry release. I haven't had my coffee yet. Oh, I should get one,
and the sustain, and the decay. I want to be it's to be staccato,
and i'm going to turn the glide on: that is a classic part of the 303 sound,
so you can hear it sweep between the notes, turn the resonance up, frequency down.
You should start to recognize that sound now, but that doesn't sound nearly filthy enough, am I right?
If so, give me a "hell yeah" in the comments below. Actually, don't give me a "hell yeah",
give me an "amen". All right. Okay, let's get a lovely bit of distortion on there. So i'm gonna use the....
Yeah, okay. I'm gonna use the overdrive because again all stock plugins, so let's do it. I'm just
going to drive this and get it sounding absolutely filthy. Nice, okay, let's get a delay on there,
with ping pong, turn the feedback down otherwise it's gonna go cray cray.
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