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All about bass
It’s all about the bass in these three walkthroughs, moving from simple bass sounds to more complex creations
Bass plays both a rhythmic and melodic role in music and can sometimes be very prominent in a track, while at other times almost invisible, providing a supportive role holding down the low frequencies. In our three bass walkthroughs we’re going to provide three different jump-in points using three different synths.
Our synths have plenty of presets to page through and that’s ideal for finding sounds. Even so, bass synth sounds are pretty straightforward to create from scratch and provide a good way to acquaint yourself with a synth’s capabilities. So in our first walkthrough we’ll look at creating a couple of slightly different synth bass sounds from scratch. These are by design meant to be functional, solid patches and are ideal for the supportive role mentioned above. The first is a solid 808-style hip-hop bass sound, and the second a more plucky sound with more attack and character.
“Bass synth sounds are pretty straightforward to create from scratch”
Of course bass doesn’t have to just play a supportive role, and when you want your bass sound to take centre stage, our simple sounds aren’t going to cut it. In our second bass walkthrough we’re looking at a much more complex sound and for this we’ll use u-he’s Zebra CM. In fact, to get the sound we’re after we’ll also need to throw three processing plugins into the mix. These are all sourced from the Suite. This is clearly a more complex sound design process, but follow the tutorial step-by-step and at the end you should have a killer lead bass sound.
It’s all good designing sounds, but what about writing parts? In our third walkthrough we look at how to get started programming bass parts. Beginning with a simple off beat pattern, we then move onto basic house parts and then gradually finesse these ideas by working on note lengths, velocities and passing notes. Admittedly, this is only one style, but it shows how the process of refinement can take you from something totally uninspired to something with feel. These are universal techniques which you can then take and apply across plenty of other genres.