more about processing basslines

[przechuy]

Medway already suggested some tips how to gel better bassline with kick

Now i would love to hear more tips from you how you process baslines to make it more unique,interesting etc.

Especially,it came to my mind to use some short reverb.

Would it cause problems ?A lot of people totally disadvice using reverb on such stuff,as it should be mono etc ,easier to handle.

But i also heard in a lot of tracks that actually reverb was applied,and i know that those tracks do work in club

[admin]

It's fine to have verb on basslines, just eq out the low end in it either in the reverb itself or on the buss it's on.

[przechuy]

thanks for fast reply mate,will try something with it

[admin]

Another thing to do is mult the sound and hipass it and then you can do anything you want to it really. Especially in d&b they always process the upper mids on a layer separate from the subs.

[przechuy]

thanks man,will give it a try,could You write something more about hipiassing it ?more about frequencies?

i am just leaving to stripclub where i work ,so gonna read it in the morning i guess

[olidenson]

Hey przechuy, I do this a lot (mult the bass/hi pass etc).

For me I first figure out whether my kick or bass is going to contain the most SUB frequencies and once I have that decided I then get to work on the bass.

Sometimes I will split my bass sound into three channels with an eq on each, this is very easy in Ableton as I just drag an audio rack into the track and create 3 chains. I would think in other DAW's you would simply create two audio tracks and have them receive the audio from the bass track (so now you have 3 tracks pumping out your bass sound)

1) Lower the vol of each by around -3dB.

2) Now you add an eq/filter to each track. The first will be the LO end so set it to LowPass at around 100Hz.

3) The second track will be our MIDS so use an eq again to HiPass at 100-200Hz and LoPass the top end off at around 500Hz (of course it depends on the sound).

4) Finally on the third track simply use a HiPass filter to cut at around the 500 mark and then LoPass as much hi end as you want.

OK, now you have your bass sound separated into three ranges:

5) I always put some sort of mono plug-in on the Lo track to make sure it has no strange stereo spreading. In Ableton I use the Utility plug-in for this with the width set to 0%, but I'm sure most DAW's have some sort of mono/stereo plugin. I do this so the lo end of the bass stays where you want it in the CENTER. This keeps everything feeling solid.

6) So now you have your Lo end correctly in the center you are free to apply those naughty effects to your mids and highs without it messing with the solid thumping lo end.

It's really up to you here to experiment but I'll give you a couple ideas:

Lets be silly first... I love doing this as it breaks the rules. Push your Mid track hard panned to the left and Hi track hard panned to the right. Now listen, your Lo end stays in the center but the clicks and body of your bass is spread. I like this as it adds immediate interest to the sound. Now offset the mid and hi tracks a few milliseconds and listen to how the sound becomes alive (you can do this by simply setting a delay to zero feedback, 100% wet and about 5-30ms of time. e.g. Mid's at 5ms and Hi's at 15ms)

Another thing I like to do is put a chorus on the mid or hi which causes an nice spreading sound obviously leaving your Lo end untouched. It's the best of both worlds and we are essentially separating one sound so we can effect only the frequencies we want.

I also love to put some mild saturation/distortion on just the LowEnd to beef it up bit. This is great as like in the previous examples we are only effecting one particular frequency range of our sound. It beefs up the Lo bass but doesn't add any artifacts to our Hi's and Mid's.

Have fun, go nuts... finally,you can use delays, reverbs, chorus flangers and anything else you want on your bass without ruining its stereo positioning or phase etc.

As a last measure, BUSS you three bass parts together and apply some mild compression and eq to iron out your sound further, I would start by cutting a few dB around the 300-400 mark to clean out some mud.

That's it.. hopefully this all makes sense. I will write another technique I use later where I utilize the same mentality but using different sounds for each frequency range.

[przechuy]

what an amazing response!


and yes i tried with filters,i have great vst filter ,added bit of distortion...and my bass never sounded that good

it really seem to be something that lacked in my music .

You learn something new everyday

[admin]

Great post. Would second all those ideas. Especially the bit about going crazy.

Another thing you could do is even bounce down that layer and then resample it and
layer it with another bounced layer. Basically just building and building till you get
something really unique and non presety.

[djglenn]

Just tried using olidenson's technique. Definitely an interesting route to go, especially playing around with the mid/high freqs.

Ready to write that other technique you mentioned?

[olidenson]

Of course.

Instead of splitting one sound into three frequencies ranges I like to choose three different bass sounds and have one act as the lo, one for the mid and one for the high.

So if your using presets or making your own sounds, it's a case of choosing the correct sounds to fill the job.

A lot of presets are over the top as they want to show off what their synth is capable of, I usually find that creating my own sounds is the way to go.

So for Lo's I'll start with a nice sub tone.

The Mids will be a sound that has more body like a real bass sample or even a lead sound played low.

The High's are any sound that has stuff going on up in the higher frequencies.

Then using the before mentioned technique of using eq's and filters to shave of the unwanted frequencies and adding effects to the mids and highs you end up with something very unique.

Hope this makes sense, Id be happy doing a step by step explanation if it doesn't.