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Creating thumping bass lines
Use the adjective that you prefer: thumping, rumbling, or just plain FAT. If you listen to electronic music, especially of the danceable variety, you probably enjoy the sensation of the clean, fat bass sounds vibrating in your auditory canal. But as a music producer, how do you create this?
First thing’s first, get good monitor speakers or headphones — i.e., something with a flat frequency response so you can well, monitor, what you are doing. (They are called monitors for a reason!) Typical consumer headphones that emphasize the lower frequencies are just going to fool you into thinking you’re making great thumping sounds, when in reality they might be quite puny.
Now on to the tip… It’s mostly an art, rather than a science, but here’s a good starting point:
- Start with a square or triangle wave.
- Filter out as much of the harmonics as you can using a low-pass filter. You should end up with something close to a sine wave, but not quite. (Or else we would have just used a sine wave!)
- Change the amplitude envelope so that you get a fast (sharp) attack and a slow (long) sustain. If you want to get fancy, add a very short blip/peak at the beginning of the curve.
- Using an equalizer (or other full spectrum filter), boost the low frequencies, but cut away all frequencies below 20 Hz (you can’t hear them anyway, and they’re not good for your speakers at high volumes)
- Experiment…
The next thing thing you need to know is something called “ducking” (no quacking involved), but that’s for another day. Google it. In essence: You don’t want your bass line playing at the same time as your kick.
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