> Step by step

Bass number one

1

Moving over to the bass sounds and Ryan starts to detail two riffs, the first of which is in the verse section as shown, a live-sounding bass (albeit programmed) with which he was going for that French filtered sound. 2

Ryan explains that this bass was filtered more once the tune got transferred from Logic to Live (Armand’s choice of DAW) but shows some Logic filtering on the sound here.

3

To make us all feel a little better for using presets, Ryan reveals the first bass sound is the A.Bass preset from the (rather great) Korg M1 plugin, an emulation of a classic hardware workstation from the late 80s.

4

Because we’re now talking bass, Ryan employs some filtering to take off the top end, giving the bass more definition but also – if he wants – veering more towards that filtered sound.

5

Ryan then runs the bass through a Chris Lord-Alge (CLA) bass processor from Waves that is a multi-effect. This nudges the harmonic content up and also adds a little distortion.

6

For this track, Ryan employed the classic sidechain process – where the bass is sidechained by the kick with a muted ‘ghost’ kick channel – although he doesn’t use this method so much now.