Get that Golden bass

“When working on a bass sound, I split it up into at least two sections: the sub frequency area (40-100 Hz range) and everything above. Sometimes I use a ‘midrange’ bass and another for the even higher frequencies. Depends on how much of the bass you actually want to ‘hear’. For the sub, I often use Logic’s ES-1, with a simple setting: sawtooth, and keep the envelope simple with no special curve (short attack and release). I either filter out the highs with the ES-1‘s cutoff, or apply an EQ and cut high end. Also, I apply some compression and a bit of limiting to the bass sound, to make sure there aren’t any wild peaks and that all notes stay at around the same level while playing. Keep an eye on the levels of the sub bass, so it doesn’t conflict with the kick (or any other sound in the mix).

“For the mids, I love NI Massive, as there are plenty of great presets to start with: clean, warm and punchy. I use an EQ to filter out the low end (covered by the sub already) and to sharpen the high end (to avoid clashing frequencies with synths, vocals etc). Again, I apply a compressor to get a bit more control over the levels. Maybe some other effects.

“If I use another bass sound, I work on this like the mid-bass, just with higher frequency settings on the EQ. For all bass sounds, I apply a sidechain compressor (or a dedicated plugin like Cableguys VolumeShaper) to make sure the bass is being compressed/ducked whenever the kick hits. For the sub, I apply a very strong setting; for the other bass sounds I might go a bit softer to not take away all the bass sound on the beat (when the kick hits). It’s a bit of playing around with those settings to achieve a nice groove and homogenous mix of kick and bass. At the end, I often send all bass sounds through one bus to get full control over all of them at the same time. Here I can also dial in another limiter to tame the peaks a bit.”