How do you create your complex phrases?

[Add9]

Use multiband compression on all your bass sounds to smooth them out and you will find that when you level them, they flow so much better together than before. It also makes it easier to level all the bass sounds since they won't have ridiculous peaks at certain frequencies, as a lot of unprocessed growls do. This is especially important for music like Knife Party where each sound takes up the entire spectrum by itself. Also, processing all the basses in the same or similar ways helps to gel them together, especially doing frequency splitting on all your basses at once.

But of course the most important thing is to start with good sounds to begin with, because all the processing in the world won't make two sounds that aren't meant to be together sound good together.

[blinx]

complex phrases? just cut and paste midi clips where ever you want across your daw.... go crazy

This

[Undrig]

Here's how I do it.
Create your melody first. Bounce a sub bassline with it and ensure it's hitting the proper registers.
Rebounce multiple passes of the same melody using a different synth patch you made.
Split all the files apart of each of these recordings note for note. (pretty easy to do with ableton)
Color each clip differently so each note is the same color on every channel. (helps for visual reference)

Frankenstein all the passes together into one cohesive line with the sub underneath it.
Do lots of fucked up processing to the frankensteined resampled bits.
In the end it sounds like this.
http://kobnet.net/~epsy/undrig/glitchbass1.mp3

[Mr 50]

A 'master' midi phrase is definitely one of the best ways - as people have been talking about.

In the past I've just copied the same midi to every instrument then gone about deleting sections of the midi on each chanel so that 1 or sometime 2 synths / sounds are playing a that time. Writing a good melody or bassline is something that i think gets lost when everyone is fixated on getting the biggest / boldest / nastiest / interesting sound design (but that is important obviously).

Another good way is to bounce out really short phrases (a few different notes from each sound, a wobble, a FX etc etc) and put them into a sampler so you can jam MPC style.

I do this a lot with the organic elements of tracks (like in the track below where I've sampled horn and guitar sounds and put them into a sampler to jam on), but also sometimes for synths.