Techniques -creating bassline that gonna bounce your ass off

[przechuy]

Ok.
Time for a new post from most handsome poster in this universe.


I think majority of us agree that good bassline,that cooperates with kick,is sometimes enough to create a really good ,groovy track!

Especially visible it is in those more funky tracks,when funky bassline is bread and butter .

Though i often struggle a lot creating bassline that i have in mind.
And i am never satisfied with presets in VST's as they 99,9% suck .



What are your "tricks" when you make a baslsine,a starting point?

I personally pick a kick,.sometimes add a cong loop and then i pick a VST that i like and tweak it.Usually blindly ,because iam not to keen on creating sounds,programming synths,just basic stuff,that i do "on ear" with trial and error tweaking some knobs.Offcourse i am not talking about such certain stuff as delay,attack,sustain etc . Rather playing with oscilators.


1.For me it is easiest to get a nice bass from those arturia recreations like minimoog,arp etc as they have this sound that i like and are imo almost made to sound juicy and nice.


2.Then usually i toy in piano roll with notes ranging from C2 to even C4 sometimes


3.Sometimes i hit lower keys on keyboard and record it,and when something that i like is going on,i stop,and tweak it in piano roll.


4.I think a creative tool when we have a total blackout might be also trashing random notes into piano roll and then playing with quantization.

5.Nice sexy trick with basslines is (something i stealed from chris lake video tutorial) adding a noise oscilator to bass and toying with it,gives nice sharp effects ,and later when polaying with cutoff might give super effects,few times i managed to create something nice this way.



But still,biggest pain in the ass if for me to create the sound that is in my head.And it is only with basslines,because i do not have this problem with other parts of tracks.
And good bassline can inject somethins special to every song.



Any tips,discoveries ,inventions in this area by You lads?

[admin]

I generally just keep going at it until something sticks, it can be the first one I write or one many tries later. Sometimes I'll save 3-4 basslines with them muted to see which one I like later. I also play them in more often than draw. I normally spend quite a bit of time on the bassline as for me it's the most important part of a track.

[przechuy]

same like me,most important.thats why it is sometimes frustrating

but i think i found one tweak taht immediatelly helped me,i changed a bit limiter settings and bass sounds much better,


What can You medway advice with EQing/filtering bass.
Do you use any filter plugins to shape the sound?
I never used it in past,but recently tried some filter toying on bass ,additional,not only those provided in softsynths,and results were worth getting into it for me

[admin]

Few things I've been doing recently:

URS saturator is nice to tighten up the bass and make it less wooly and peaky sounding so it sits better

Soundtoys can saturate too which does similar as above


I think saturation works a bit better than limiting as it's more solid and less likely to kill the sound than limiting in my experience. A good trick I used to use with the Fatso was sending the kick and bass to same channel and compressing to gel them together.