Quick (percussive) basslines..

[S]

yes, limit your synthsizer to one voice

Never thought of that, really simple. Gonna try that.. thank you!

do u use battery3 ?

No, I'm using a synth to synthesize my own short bass sounds (Operator.. but it could be any other synth).

also if you swing or shuffle the bass line and create an accent to velocity/filter/attack etc or reverse sounds

Ehm.. could you be more specific, I'm not that familiar with those terms.. but it sounds interesting.

I think the "one voice" or mono suggestions will help with the overlaping notes... also when you have only one voice it can be nice to sustain notes as the new note will cut the previous, so no overlaping mess.

with operator you can control velocity of notes by either playing the keys at different velocity or with the mouse (Alt + left click and drag up/down) on notes in the editor. Normaly volocity controls volume but if you look for instance at the filter section in operator you will see freq<vel which links to the freq env - so you can control and vary these parameters using velocity - anything with ?<vel you can do this.

Ableton has global groove, set your clips to swing 16 in the clip view and increase the global groove amount - I personaly like to work with a free grid or triplet grid rather than use the groove - this helps loosen up bass lines , hi hats , of beat snares etc but only certain elements benifit from it so its not always good to apply to say a busy drum rack clip.

hope you made some sense of all that - its mushroom season

[oblioblioblio]

I think the key to a 'speedy' bassline is to have a very good relationship with the kick and the other bass sound(s). (envelope times, placement, pitches etc etc).

If they interlock well you can have a very nice downwards and then upwards movement which I think is where the 'speed' comes from.

[nospin]

another thought is to use the drum racks, set up at least two instances of your operator on two different drum pads, and use the choke groups... might be the sound you are looking for

[MINIMALTECHNOHOUSE]

Try shifting your notes forward in your bass and snare, that works nice, try 10ms to start.

(Press the "D" button to bring up the track delay)

[::BLM::]

I think the key to a 'speedy' bassline is to have a very good relationship with the kick and the other bass sound(s). (envelope times, placement, pitches etc etc).

Yep this is true. Speed comes from the relationship between the drum parts. You dont need to fill the pattern up with lots of notes, you just need to place the parts in the correct place.

[Sphere42]

try fiddlind with "Time" knob. Operator has this special function for shifting time related settings for all operators (voices, layers, or whatever it is, it's that ABCD thingy)

[Phase Ghost]

Just make your bass sounds shorter and they won't overlap.

Seriously though, I was in your position once so I took a few hours and made a load of sinewaves in a range of about 10 octaves wih 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 varieties of each octave.

I did it mainly because the sine tone in exs24 gets a nasty beginning and ending click if you don't add attack and release, but when you get down to 1/16 and 1/32 length sines there's no time so I made a sh!t load of different sines at different lengths. It's my default bass load up instrument now.