Ableton & Plugins/VST

[Tyrisia]

For bass (and as an all round synth) I'd strongly recomment Novation's V Station. It sounds great and has a good set of effects too, including a great sounding distortion. It does a lot of my lead sounds as well, and it does them very well indeed.

If you want a synth that *can* be easy to use to get random techno-y sounds, just get this, it's a free synth called Crystal. It is a cpu hog, but you can freeze it in Ableton and flatten down to an audio clip instead.

Crystal Synth

Happy music making dude :)

[aallvor]

Yeah, V-Station is great, very easy to use. Crystal is not tho, newb friendly, that is...

[Tyrisia]

Yeah, V-Station is great, very easy to use. Crystal is not tho, newb friendly, that is...

Yeah, I can see what you mean, but you could just load two different sounds and press the breed button, and always come up with something different and usable.

[aallvor]

True. But I think making your own sounds from scratch is more rewarding in the long run, though I'm not quite there yet myself...

[Tyrisia]

True. But I think making your own sounds from scratch is more rewarding in the long run, though I'm not quite there yet myself...

There's definitely something to be said for makin your own, but even the best often take a shortcut and find a preset that has the right tonal qualities to start with, then customize after that. Finding out how to customize a preset is the best way to learn synthesis I reckon, if you can almost hear what you're after it's a great motivational factor.

Random sound generation can give some very interesting sounds that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise, and again you can customize after that. Treat random sound generation as a good inspirational tool, coz that's what it's good at.