Somebody say ‘bass’

Ever since the advent of the affordable sampler, people have been recording the sound of their own voice and playing musical riffs with it. In fact, we’re willing to bet that after shelling out for a Fairlight CMI (the first sampler, costing around £20,000 in 1979), even the likes of early adopters Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder weren’t shy about burping into the mic and playing the result up and down the keyboard.

Fast forward to the mid-80s and early rap hit (Nothing Serious) Just Buggin’ by Whistle took a single syllable of a sampled vocal and played a riff with it, achieving UK chart success in the process. Other global hits doing the same thing included Yello’s Oh Yeah, and while that one actually features a separate bassline in some sections, much of the track consists of nothing but drums and the deep, rich artificial baritone of a sampled vocal.

These days we have much more advanced processing at our disposal and we can add artificially generated sub-harmonics to any sound, including making full-on sub-rattling sampled vocal riffs that can serve as basslines in their own right. But there’s no reason why any of the sounds discussed here have to be the only bass element in your track. As Yello’s seminal hit proved, sometimes non-bass bass parts are at their best when used for just a few sections of a track while the rest is underpinned by a conventional bassline. The key is to make sure that when you don’t have any other bassline playing, your other elements can stand up alone without a gaping hole in the low end.

Another option is to reinforce your bottom end with a deep, sub-heavy kick or simple subbass part, while placing your pitched-down sampled vocal in the essential bass range between sub-bass (60Hz or lower) and low-mids (250-500Hz). In such cases, it’s usually best to cut everything out of the part below 60Hz to leave space for the sub to breathe cleanly.

Whichever approach you choose, though, make sure that what you have sounds awesome. Let’s have a look at how to create, edit and tune vocal samples that work well as basslines.

“Sometimes non-bass bass parts are at their best when used for just a few sections”