In the pit

Recording household objects is great fun, but it’s by no means the only way to create tasty basslines from sources other than synth bass and bass guitars. Orchestral and world music are no strangers to the bottom end. Beethoven, Schubert, Britten… these guys were fully au fait with arse-twitching rumbles, and the only thing they lacked were the tools to channel naturally deep instruments like the tuba into funky, compressed basslines.

Of course they probably didn’t see things that way, but the world keeps spinning, and if they were alive today, no doubt they’d be excited by the possibilities afforded them by modern kit.

In this walkthrough we’re going to show you how to take real instruments (tuba and didgeridoo, to be specific) and tweak their sounds to create funky and playable sampled bass patches.

To follow along, then, you’ll need to get hold of some tuba and didgeridoo samples. Feel free to source your own or, of course, you can download all sorts of free samples from the net. As ever we should plug our own site musicradar. com which has a vast amount of samples under the site of Sample Radar (do a search and Google will take you direct to the main menu).

There are many other great sites out there for free sounds, including more commercial and professional outfits like splice.com and loopmasters.com who all offer free demo sample packs.

Other less well known sites include Samplefocus (which has some great tuba samples to use in our walkthrough below) and sampleswap.org. You’ll need to register to search and download on most sites.

The other sample we’ve used is taken from freesound.org. It’s free to sign up and we highly recommend you do. Whether you’re after bizarre street recordings, esoteric instrument solos or just some stock Foley, it’s one of the best soundware resources on the net.

We’ll be using a didgeridoo sample from the site which you can download from http:// freesound.org/people/8767yy/sounds/212704.

“Orchestral and world music are no strangers to the bottom end”