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Goldenscan (pro producer) posted this on the AudioPioneers.net forum.. it's basically all you need to know about basslines.. after this just experiment to get the sound you want..
Bass is usually made up of 2,3 or 4 parts.
Let's start from the bottom and work up.
All dance music has a very high presence of sub, usually generated by either sawtooth, square, or sinewaves. The notes are always spaced around the kik (never on it or spilling into it). Rhythmwise, it's all about screwing it into the bass parts that we will talk about in the next section. To get a good resonating sub experiment with the res in relation to the cut off, try working with the res about half way up and work the cutoff down until you start to hear good sub harmonics (your speakers should start to rattle (not too much though))
Next comes the part of the bass that drives the rhythm. When programing this mute the sub that you have fiddled with.
Program a basic sound that sounds punchy. Start with a sawtooth and put the filter env amount up to about half way and set up the filter envelope so that the decay drops relatively sharply. Set the sustain at about the same level as the Decay. Now drop the cutoff until the saw starts to sound choppy yet not too short. All of these setting require alot of anoraking so take your time.
Next you want to get a rhythm that works with your kik. This is up to you and depends on what sort of line you are trying to acheive. They usually fall into few categories; offbeat (spaced on the half note between kiks), opposing (sixteenth type rhythm playing between the octave on a particular note ( e.g space, d2, d3, d2, space, d2, d2, d3) and half time triplet (e.g space, space, space, d2, space, space, d2, space, space).
This is probably a good time to work on the sound. A basic way to do this is to flick through presets until you find something that has the sort of frequencies that you like and apply the previous filter principles to the sound. The best way is to programm the sound taht you want but I could never explain this in writing.
Once you have got something that's grooving with you kik it's time to start blending.
Your sub is occupying the low frequencies, if your rhythm bass has sub frequencies it will phase and sound shit so you need to kill all the eq up to and around the 200 hz area. Now listen to your top bass and sink into the groove, where are the most prevelant notes (the ones that are really dictating the groove, this should give you a good idea as to where to try placing the sub notes.
Remember all of this is trial and error, there is no magic formular to bass.
Now you need to start playing around with the rhythm of both parts until they start to sound good. Experiment with note lengths they are very important. Try muting and unmuting notes. Experiment with all the eq aswell as the shelf on your bass kill on the top sound.
I could go on forever but bass is real a black art. It's all about working many things at the same time; the cutoff on both sounds, the res, the filter env, the filter adsr, the eq and the rhythm etc etc.
A few tips once you have got something you are happy with
Try adding chorus to top bass sounds
Try adding 4/8 delay with very short feedback to teenthy style top bass.
Add tiny amounts of distortion bass to increase harmonics.
Use compression. Also try compressing the kik and bass together.
Don't be afraid to stack extra sounds to add other aspects.
These are the basics, I could go into side chaining compression and miriads of other stuff but these are all things that are part of the very long process that is bass.
Hope this helps you as well as others
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