> Step by step

1. Turning a vocal into a bassline

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We start by recording a few spoken words, as low as we comfortably can, and keep them short and punchy – stick to single syllables – so that they still sound tight when pitched down a little. We employ two versions of the word ‘Yo’, making one slightly longer than the other. We then load the shorter, punchier one into Ableton Live’s Sampler and add the loop LWK_122_Down_Full.wav from FileSilo. 2

Next we edit the start point to make sure we have a crisp, sharp attack, then play a simple riff. We tweak the tuning to taste – deep but not so deep that the sample starts to break up. It’s also important to keep the note lengths to something tight and punchy, and make sure the timing fits the drums nicely.

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Now we add the longer ‘Yo’ every other bar, filling a gap in the groove, and tune it to match the tuning of the main vocal riff. We now have a nice vocal riff comfortably occupying the lower mids and bass range. We add a limiter to it to lend further weight, so that when we turn up the volume we really feel some weight in the vocal.

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We add a gate to tighten up the vocal further (keeping the envelope punchy), followed by an EQ to remove messy subs below around 90Hz. We also EQ out a little notch around the 250Hz area to tame those muddy, boxy frequencies. Finally we add some reverb to fill out the part, giving it a bit of size and space, followed by another gate to ensure that the reverb doesn’t loosen things. (Audio: Yo bass riff)