@sim667 561169 wrote:

Massive seems to be the go to plugin for bass on ableton, I can get a deep sound with it, but it sounds like I’m getting a click at the start of a midi clip with it…… i still haven’t worked out how to get rid of the click fully, but I’m only a complete novice when it comes to music.

first reduce the volume on that track (it may be pushing everything into clipping and the meters on most DAWs are small and not easy to see), if the click still happens then check the soundcard drivers and settings for timing / sync errors. You might need to trade better quality for a few more miliseconds of latency between activating a keyboard or controller and something happening on the computer.

also purge the computer of any unneeded crapware, any programs what start up in the system tray that do not need to be there, defrag the hard drive and make sure there is as much RAM as possible.

if possible try and devote a computer to music production (rather than the same laptop for work, school/university) and avoid the internal soundcard on laptops and even many PC’s (they are cheap and noisy and intended for VOIP telecoms and gaming), use an external USB one

@ Gaz – Use samples for kicks if they have no good ones in the program, use a sampler or drum machine type plug in to trigger the samples in midi, or what I do is manually place each beat on the grid in audio (you have so much more control over each drum sound then as each drum has a dedicated channel but it’s a lot more work).

I’ll later route my drums to buses or groups, all the high hats, all the percussion etc. things generally in the same pitch range will go to the same buss. I’ll then be able to apply processing such as compression to the high hats to keep them a consistent volume across all hats after having got each hat sounding how I want on the individual tracks. Things like the Kick and the snare will have their own channel as they are the two main driving drum sounds (you may even have multiple of each of these drums of diferant sounding samples or several layered and played over each other, eq’d, compressed then bussed – there’s an infinite way of doing things tbh, it’s all about creativity).

Eventually I’ll buss ALL drums to one track and further process them together to glue them and make them sound as one. Well sometimes I do this, Sometimes I don’t.

It all depends on the tune you’re making to how you do things though tbh. Still it’s all about getting good drum samples in the first place. 😉

@Gylfi Sigurðsson 561187 wrote:

Forgot to say I’m using ableton 9

No you didn’t. 😛