Classic Dub & Bass
We’ve gone far back with the mighty Vault this month as we dig deep for some dub and almost as deep for even more bass mayhem…
Crikey, we’re going far back in time this month to issue 124, April 2008, where we gave away a huge selection of dub bass samples. What better, we thought, than to present them to you alongside our all-new mutated bass sounds. So here’s what our samplists said, or at least one of them (back then we didn’t let Oli speak…)
Robbie from Cyclick Samples said: “The tempo has been slowed down and with a shout of ‘Jah’, subby bass and the emphasised third beat has been laid down for a dub collection of samples.
“Taking the golden period of the early to mid 70s (King Tubby and Lee Perry in particular) as inspiration, four construction kits and eight multisampled instruments have been created. The loop kits feature beats, drum hits, guitars, organs, pianos, a monosynth (a la Lee Perry’s Double Seven) and lots of percussion.
“Everything has been given a big dose of spring reverb and tape delay to create that dub sound. The tempos for the kits are around the 130bpm area, though the half-time emphasis of dub means the pulse is really half that.
“The looped samples are cut to whole-bar lengths, but many have a few extra bars left on the end to allow for reverb and delay decays to roll out.
“The multisampled instruments have been made with four notes per octave at tone-and-a-half intervals. Each loop kit also has a folder of ‘dub outs’, which are dubstyle cut-ups of the construction kit instruments with the obligatory delay/reverb swamping.”
For another bonus bass set, we’re going back to issue 171, Nov 2011.
For Cyclick’s: “These were made using an Epiphone Ripper and early issue Stingrays, recorded through a Focusrite ISA828 mic preamp and given a gentle squeeze by the ART ProVLA optical compressor. The multis were made using Kurzweil, Jen and BassStation synths, as well as a variety of softsynths, all recorded through outboard units and pedals so that as much processing as possible was applied in the analogue domain.”
For Groove’s: “We used a variety of gear to create these, unearthing a 360 Systems pro MIDI bass module from the late 80s. Low-end synth effects were created with simple tone generators like the Korg Monotron and Bugbrand Weevil, run through multiple effects.”
All these samples are in the Free Samples folder on the DVD or at filesilo.co.uk under issue 296.