We’ve talked about how great the 1980s were for bass players, as they escaped the confines of guitar-rock music and found room to be heard in other genres. But looking back, the reality was that the 1980s would eventually spell the end of the road for many bassists, in the sense of being heard prominently on commercial releases; the synthesiser, the sampler, and the sequencer, conspired to take the low end action away from the traditional player, as the 1990s approached. We’re not saying bass players don’t or should’t exist any more, or that there aren’t fantastic new players around – there are. But ‘real’ bass just isn’t something you need in the same way, in today’s pop tunes, and even when you see a bass guitar in a video, it doesn’t mean there’s one on the track. Synth or sampled bass has a lot going for it: it’s easy to program, infinitely customisable, and – bonus – there’s one less ego to deal with. Savvy bass players learned how to program for themselves, or branched out into less standardised instrumentation – this is when the 5-string bass guitar appeared, the low ‘B’ enabling it to better cooperate or compete with synthesisers.
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Trevor Horn’s production of Two Tribes by Frankie Goes To Hollywood is a prime example of 80s production – where sampling made new techniques possible, although they were torturously slow to implement. That song uses what sounds like live slap bass and sampled bass (on a Fairlight CMI) to fantastic effect. Try Arturia’s recreation. 2
Sequencing was also part of the Fairlight experience, with the Page R sequencer being used to program the beats and the sampled bass track. You can also experience this classic workflow by using the Peter Vogel CMI iOS app, or the QasarBeach application for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Crude but effective!
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Ableton Live will let you import type 1 and type 0 MIDI files, but it doesn’t support the general MIDI standard, so there are no automatic instrument assignments, you’ll have to do that yourself. This might make it a little bit slower to quickly audition a MIDI file, but it still works.
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It’s easy to get carried away with everything that a modern sampler can do – even an entry level example, and these days we can choose between hardware and software devices. But looking at these projects can remind us that it’s not always necessary to go too technical to get results.
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In order to get a look at the bass as part of the overall song structure, it helps to download the MIDI Type 1 file for the song – this is freely available from various sites online. Drop it into your favourite DAW – we tested with Live 11, Logic Pro X, and GarageBand.
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With GarageBand and Logic, as soon as a MIDI file is dropped onto an empty project, a sound is automatically assigned to each instrument track. In both programs, the Slap Bass preset is loaded for both bass tracks, but of course you can choose any sound or sample you like.