Music is moving

As we’ve seen in this tutorial, adding a higherpitched sound on top of a sub-bass gives us a fuller-sounding, more satisfying bassline. Taking this to its logical conclusion, that would mean that to get the biggest, bestsounding bass ever, all we need is a noise in which every odd and even harmonic is present! Sadly, life isn’t so simple, as that would just give us a sawtooth tone – not a very interesting sound. What’s important to understand, then, is that it’s not just the frequency content present in sounds that gives them their impact, but how they move – and this is true both on the micro (individual drum and bass sounds) and macro (an entire track) level.

Let’s look to the idea of impact in dynamic range. We know that a loud sound that comes out of nowhere has much more impact on the listener than one that is preceded by a similarly loud noise. This is because the human ear gets used to sounds pretty quickly, and this is the reason that much highenergy dance music is complex in terms of rhythm and sound design – it keeps the listener on their toes and is exciting to experience as the track progresses.

There are essentially three ways in which we can give our bass sounds more movement: these are volume (perhaps tremolo, but more often the silences, or at least reduction in volume, between notes), pitch (either playing different notes, or using the kind of pitch modulation that we’ve looked at in this tutorial), and frequency content (for example, the filter LFO movement that we created in the previous tutorial). An obvious example of these techniques in action is using rapid changes in pitch or frequency content to create the sort of ‘wobble’ sounds that became a mainstay of dubstep back in the day.

There’s plenty of scope for creativity and adaptation in this area, and indeed, many of the more ‘tear-out’ styles of dance have evolved to essentially become little more than sequences of extreme ‘wobs’, ‘wubs’ and ‘yois’.

Even if you’re not making this kind of music yourself, it’s always worth bearing in mind that you can make your own basslines more exciting by incorporating that sort of movement, whatever genre you happen to be working in.