Reese’s pieces
Hungry for more bass-based chat, we probed Joe yet further on his appreciation of devastating neuro wobs, his favourite software, and his side hustle as a music production tutor…
: What’s key to a good DnB bassline? JF: “It’s impossible to assign one attribute that makes a bassline good, but for me, I guess what I’ve always loved is something that feels like it exists in the real world. The top end of my favourite basslines have this ridiculous kind of ‘ripping’, which feels like it might actually exist. A sawtooth wave doesn’t sound like a real thing, but listen to a Koan Sound bass – it feels like it’s a living thing that’s moving around and has this top end that you can almost touch.”
: How does one go about giving their top end this ‘realistic’ quality? JF: “So many ways! The source material has to be good, then distorting and saturating that sound in ways that bring out its qualities. I find it intensely difficult to create something that wasn’t there originally – with midrange, it’s easier to add movement later on, but if the original sound doesn’t have a really gritty top end, adding it later is so difficult. It’s definitely about not polishing turds, but starting from something with quite a lot of grit, then accentuating it more and more as it goes down the chain.” : And Serum is your weapon of choice? JF: “A lot of my career was based around using sounds from Massive. At the time, that felt like the most versatile and modern synth. Serum just seemed like the next logical step. I still use both, but Serum can do everything Massive can and more. I just don’t know if there’s a viable alternative. FM8 kinda could be, but there’s some stuff in that which I hate!”
: What do you hate about FM8? JF: “It’s really important in so many styles of music to be able to automate the decay or change an envelope over time, but as far as I know, you just can’t automate decay or release length in FM8. You can move them with your mouse and render it in, but that’s locking audio in way earlier than I’d like. I prefer to resample as late as I possibly can. If I’m doing a build-up with an arpeggio or something, I want the decay length to open up as it goes on. It baffles me that such a popular synth doesn’t allow that.” : So why Ableton Live? JF: “That was a recent move. I’ve been giving lessons for the last year or so, and for electronic musicians and people just getting into it, Ableton seems to be the go-to. There are various things you can do in Live that just take so much longer in every other DAW that I know. I like to use its ability to split signals within a single channel a lot – it’s so much easier in Live than anything else – and the stock plugins are geared more towards sound design than other DAWs. If you want to split a signal in other hosts, you have to set up a channel with three buses, turn off the stereo output… In Live, it’s much neater.”
: What have you learned by teaching? JF: “I didn’t realise how much having to succinctly describe how to do something would solidify your own knowledge! Some part of my brain must already know that really well, but having to express it to other people really cements that information. A lot of the time, clients are asking for a similar kind of thing: ‘How do you do that bassline from that tune?’. Having to go through the same process quite a few times over, you really streamline it, and you realise parts you can maybe remove or do better, and different ideas can sprout from it. There have been a few times I’ve done a session with a client and actually used the resulting audio in a tune!” If you’re interested in finding out more about Joe’s tuition services, you can mail him at bilayer66@googlemail.com.
“If the sound doesn’t have gritty top end, adding it later is so difficult”