Sound Categories
Recipes per sound type: sub, kick, drums, leads, pads, chords, FX, voice, feedback, textures…
Sub Bass
Clean, mono, tuned low end from Operator, Drift, Analog and sampled 808s — plus the tricks that make a sub translate to small speakers.
Kick
Kick drums from scratch in Operator, Analog, Drift and Wavetable, layered in Drum Sampler and Simpler, plus rumble buses, distortion, click layers, phase alignment and tuning per genre.
808 Bass
The 808 as a melodic bass instrument — sampled and synthesized in Operator, Drift and Analog, with glides, distortion for presence, clipping, kick layering and trap, drill and phonk pattern work.
Snare & Clap
Snares and claps from Operator, Analog, Drum Sampler, Impulse and Drum Rack layering — 909 snares, noise-burst claps, rimshots, UKG, DnB and dubstep variants, gated reverb, transient shaping and roll programming.
Hi-Hats & Percussion
Metallic FM hats in Operator, noise hats in Wavetable, sampled hats in Drum Sampler and Impulse, choke groups, Live 12 velocity and chance humanization, tuned percussion with Corpus and Collision, trap rolls, techno 16th grooves and stereo tricks.
Reese Bass
Detuned-saw bass with slow phase-cancellation movement — Analog, Wavetable, Operator and Drift builds, notch sweeps, distortion stages, sub layering and stereo management for DnB, dubstep and neuro.
Wobble & Growl Bass
LFO-driven wobbles and vocal/metallic growls for dubstep, riddim and UK bass — Operator FM, Wavetable formants, Roar feedback, Meld Formant/Reed, resampling loops, Corpus, Vocoder, Auto Shift and three-way layering at 140 BPM.
Deep Dubstep Bass & Sub Language
How to write and voice sound-system sub basslines at 140 — sine phrasing, glide, pressure and gaps, slow wubs from Operator, Wavetable and Drift, pitch drops, octave jumps, beating subs, harmonics, tuning per key, mono and phase — plus an 8-line bassline library.
Neuro Bass
Resampling-chain philosophy for neurofunk bass — FM Operator into Roar, Auto Filter and Shifter loops, Spectral Time/Resonator, Pitch Hack, Grain Delay, Corpus combs, Beat Repeat glitches, tempo-synced modulation hierarchy, mid-range control and an 8-step recipe.
Acid / 303
The 303 sound in Live 12 — running a Behringer TD-3 via External Instrument, CV Tools and MIDI sync with audio-effect chains, plus in-the-box Analog/Drift/Operator emulations with accent, slide, filter envelope tricks, Live 12 MIDI tools for accent/slide sequencing, Roar as 303 distortion and dub delay sends.
Leads
Lead synths in Operator, Wavetable, Analog, Drift, Meld and Simpler: mono vs poly, glide, vibrato via LFO and Expression Control, detune and width, effect staging, doubling, and genre leads from grime square to trance, synthwave, techno bleep and hyperpop.
Plucks & Arpeggios
Fast-decay envelopes on every Live synth, physical-model plucks, the Arpeggiator and Live 12 generators, and delay tricks that turn one note into a running line.
Pads & Atmospheres
Slow-moving polyphonic beds from Wavetable, Analog, Drift, Meld, Operator, Granulator III and Simpler, with the chorus/reverb staging, modulation and EQ that keep them wide, evolving and out of the mix's way.
Chords & Stabs
Dub techno chords, house piano and organ stabs, Operator FM techno stabs, garage and grime chord hits, plus the voicing tools, rhythm generators, dub delay treatment and resampling that make them move.
Drones
Sustained tones that never stop moving — Operator loop envelopes, Wavetable and Drift unison beds, granular and spectral freezes, Roar and Echo feedback, Corpus resonance, hardware through External Audio Effect, tuned to the set and layered by band.
Keys & Mallets
Electric pianos in Electric (Mallet, Fork, Damper, Pickup), mallets in Collision, sampled piano in Simpler/Sampler, Drift and Analog EP emulations, Operator FM bells, Auto Pan-Tremolo, Amp/Cabinet, tape and vinyl treatments, MPE, humanization and genre variants from lofi to deep house, trip-hop and neo-soul.
FX, Risers & Impacts
Noise and pitch risers, reverse reverb, sub drops, tape stops, stutters, granular and spectral swells, feedback runaways — and where they go in the arrangement.
Voice & Vocals
Vocal chops, formant and pitch mangling, Vocoder, granular vocals, throws, de-essing, rhythmic gating, spoken-word treatments and "vocal as bass" — the voice as raw material in Live 12.
No-Input & Feedback
Building self-oscillating feedback instruments inside Live 12 — return-to-self routing, Roar Feedback, Echo past 100 %, resonator self-oscillation, eurorack loopback — with safety first and a Feedback Machine rack.
Textures, foley & noise beds
Noise as material — white/pink/brown from Operator, Wavetable and Meld, filtered and gated noise, vinyl and tape artefacts, field recordings through Granulator III, Spectral Time and Corpus, foley as percussion, Resonators and convolution turning noise into tonal beds, rhythmic noise via Gate sidechain and Beat Repeat, and how to mix a texture so it is felt, not heard.
Strings, Brass & Physical Modelling
Bowed and plucked strings in Tension, resonant hits in Collision, synth brass from Operator/Wavetable/Analog, orchestral multisamples in Sampler, cinematic braams and MPE bowing.
Voice — Advanced & Experimental Techniques
Vocoder carriers and band maths, talkbox emulation, Auto Shift harmonies and MIDI-steered pitch, one-syllable vocal synths, granular and spectral choirs, demonic, radio, dub and trip-hop chains, beatbox kits, vocal bass, cut-ups and live vocal performance in Live 12.
Glitch & IDM Sounds
Beat Repeat, Redux, Erosion, Grain Delay, Shifter ring-mod, Spectral devices, Corpus, Looper, warp-mode abuse, Simpler Slice + MIDI tools, Follow Actions and resampling cascades for generative glitch in the box.
Dub FX & Delays
Tape-delay emulation with Echo and Delay, spring reverbs, dub sirens, chord throws on sends, controlled feedback runaway, filter sweeps on returns, Shifter pitch dubs and a performable dub delay send rack with a momentary Throw macro.
MPE & expressive sounds
Per-note pitch, slide and pressure in Live 12 with Push 3 or any MPE controller — which stock devices listen, how to wire the Wavetable and Drift matrices, Expression Control, Expressive Chords, Glissando and LFO MIDI tools, pads with slide-to-filter, leads with pressure vibrato, basses with slide-to-FM, Sampler MPE, editing expression lanes in the Stacked detail view, and building patches that survive a live set.
Generative & evolving sounds
Systems that play themselves in Live 12 — MIDI Generators and Transformations, Follow Actions and note probability, M4L modulators on macros, Random and Velocity devices, Operator loop envelopes, Wavetable Random Note unison, Meld Scrambler, Macro randomization and Variations as structure, a self-playing techno patch, an ambient generator, CV Tools driving the modular, and how to resample, curate and arrange what the system produced.
Guitar, Bass Guitar & Band Instruments in Live 12
Recording and processing real guitar, bass and drums in Live 12 — DI input and latency, Amp/Cabinet/Pedal deep-dive, post-punk chorus, shoegaze walls, post-rock delays, reamping, bass DI+amp racks, synthesized guitars, ebow sustain, surf tremolo, drum kit processing, gated snares, groove extraction, comping and following a live drummer.