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10. Kick and bass tuning and programming

1 One of the most obvious ways to avoid kick and bass clashing is to avoid having bass notes playing at the same time as the kick. The most obvious example of this is the classic disco offbeat bassline, such as we have here. This can be quite linear, though, so we can inject a touch of funk by adjusting note lengths or adding a few extra notes in the gaps.

2 We can’t always avoid bass notes playing at the same time as the kick, but we can minimise clashing or groove disruption by transposing the clashing note up or down an octave. Lower often prevents an apparent gap in the weighty end of the frequency; higher adds an audible twist on the groove. Here, we go for an octave up, and we’ve reducied the velocity of this note for groovy bounce.

3 A more involved way to minimise clashing is to copy your bass channel, delete all notes except those landing on the kick, then delete the opposite notes in the original, leaving you ‘bass’ and ‘bass clash’ channels. On the clashing channel, try filtering or other processing. Here we’ve EQed out some low bass and stereoised our high note. You may need to adjust the note’s length to suit the effect.

4 Try offsetting the timing of your bass channel (about 1-5ms) to minimise transient collisions between kick and bass. A little earlier usually adds energy, while making them a bit later normally makes things more laid back. We move our clashing high note later by 1ms and pull low notes (which don’t fall on a kick) earlier by 3ms.

5 Once we have our bassline, it’s time to tune the kick (as seen in step 3 of walkthrough 4). If the kick is still too high or low, try transposing up or down an octave. If the kick isn’t working by now, it’s time to use a different sample – it’s usually incredibly hard, if not impossible, to get mistuned kick and bass to sit nicely together.