Tom tom club

Ever since the early days of electronic music, many tracks have dispensed with proper basslines altogether. After all, bass exists largely to give sonic weight and groove, so bass elements don’t actually have to make a significant musical contribution – at least, not in a conventional melodic way. For that reason, tom toms, both real and electronic, can make an excellent bass substitute. Classic house number Break 4 Love, for example, relies entirely on big, rich, super-tight toms to provide the low end for much of the track.

This type of percussive bass part usually works best if used as a starting point. Toms (as with all drums) should almost always be tuned, but however perfectly pitched they are, it can be quite hard to get them to fit an existing riff or song when they’re used as a bassline substitute. It can work, and with electronic or sampled toms you always have the option of tuning them to fit, but that can be tricky and often involves lots of fiddly, vibe-dampening editing. Quite often you end up with something that sounds like it’s almost there, then waste an hour or two trying to get it right, only to realise the next day that you’ve been trying to push a square peg through a round hole. Having spent so much time on it already, you’ll then probably feel committed and waste the next day doing exactly the same – nothing is more dangerous in the studio than something that almost works!

Instead, we find it best to start out with drums and toms, creating a big, chunky tom-bass pattern upon which to build the rest of the track. This is fairly easy to do, but there are a few things to keep in mind that make the process much more effective.

For this walkthrough we’re using Ableton Live’s sampled drum machine toms, but real ones can work just as well. Their natural harmonics can really enrich an otherwise digital-sounding track, but there’s often something jarringly ‘pure’ about them. A simple way to bridge the sonic gap between acoustic and synthetic is subtle degrading, so try using a bitcrusher to reduce the bit rate to 12-bit.

“Bass elements don’t actually have to make a significant musical contribution”