So having a good sub underpinning your sound is a wise idea. Also, particularly in this case, it’s a good idea to have a couple of instances of your synth layered, because as soon as you start messing with filters and envelopes, some sounds can run away. It’s not essential, but does offer just that bit more flexibility should you want to layer some of your results together. This is largely down to its very clear interface and signal flow it’s dead easy to understand and you’ll soon turn a fairly tired bass sound into one that moves around all over the place.Īs usual with this sound-design series, we’re doing everything in a Reason Combinator. To be honest, there are any number of instruments within Reason that we could use to demonstrate some of these techniques, but Subtractor is the one we’ve chosen.
So while last time we were talking tame, this time we’re talking about bass sounds that bubble away and don’t sit there quietly.
How to add sustain to scarbee rickenbacker bass how to#
We’re going to show you how to program a bass sound from scratch, but take it up a few notches so that it sounds dynamic, interesting and fresh on each note. What we’re going to explore in this tutorial is how to get some of the dynamics that those two controls introduced into a more flexible and contemporary sound. With both filter frequency and resonance parameters so easily accessible, bass sounds could be twisted into just about type of ecstatic squeal, and it became such a famous sound that it is still in demand today.īut most synths will afford you the luxury of those two controls – certainly most of the ones in Reason, anyway – so you’ll probably have experimented with them already. The Roland TB-303 bassline was the machine of choice for many producers back in the late 80s and early 90s, and it lent itself to being abused well beyond what it was designed for. Essentially, dance music often demands that bass moves in many different ways.įor acid and rave, this was pretty simple stuff. Like we say, some music demands the tamer bass sounds that we covered last time other music demands something with a bit more movement something a bit more in-your-face, bass-wise! Let’s moveĭance music has put a lot of pressure on the bassline over the last few decades, from causing it to squeal when rave first appeared, through the wobble of dusbstep, going right up to date with many of the genre’s – and its many subgenres’ – more frenetic and dramatic basslines.
This time around, however, we’re going to go a little wilder for our low end. Part of the use of compression is to keep the bassline consistent and solid, very much keeping things in order. Broadly speaking, though, you should always tame a bass sound with a compressor and keep it in check with EQ, and that’s what we explored last time around when we looked at how to keep both kick and bass sounds in check within a mix.
From driving rock to cutting-edge dance, there is a huge variety of ways to approach bass and ways in which you should play or program your low-end notes. B ass is the very backbone upon which so many genres of music are built.