How to make the bass, arpeggio and pad sounds for Underworld ‘Dark & Long’ with DRC

ATTENTION: All Pre-Gain values for DRC in this video need to be lowered by 0.250.
This is because this tutorial was made with an older version of DRC which had a different tuning on the saturation stage. We have corrected the values in the Ableton session.

Download the Ableton project from this video:
https://www.imaginando.pt/uploads/goodies/tutorials/underworld-dark-and-long-project.zip

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Underworld ‘Dark & Long’:
In January 1994, Underworld released ‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman’, their third studio album and a pivotal moment in the band’s evolution. It was the first full-length release to feature new member Darren Emerson and was a solid statement of how the group’s sound had transformed into a house/techno oriented direction.

Previously more aligned with synthpop during the tail end of the 80s, the new era of Underworld, ‘MK2’ as they called it, now opened up an exciting world of ‘no rules’ collaboration, songwriting and production.

The opening track ‘Dark & Long’ was the third to be released as a single in June of 1994, but far from mainstream pop at the time, it failed to make any noticeable chart impact, appearing for one week only at number 57 in the UK singles chart.

In 1996 the track reached a much wider audience, thanks to a remixed version appearing alongside the band’s anthemic ‘Born Slippy NUXX’ as part of the soundtrack of iconic 1996 film Trainspotting. (The last time we featured an Underworld track in this series was indeed Born Slippy, back in January 2018!)

We have a trio of sounds for you this time, as we show you how to recreate the bass, arpeggio and pad sounds from ‘Dark & Long’ using DRC.

No longer in the dark,
Team Imaginando