Rough and tough bass
We’re bringing some of our favourite extreme bass sounds out to play once again. Your low end will thank you, trust us… Keeping the theme rough and tough, Oli Bell from Groove Criminals details his collection of hard-hitting bass grooves
Tough Bassics
The first of our gritty bass collections was honed by Cyclick Samples. Here’s Robbie to tell us more about it…
“Roughness can be expressed as a lack of smoothness, and the bass sounds created for this sample pack are proudly just this! Analogue amplification stages have been grossly overloaded and a variety of fuzzes and distortions employed to bring the grit, dirt and nastiness. To many ears, this may be no bad thing at all.”
“I loved every second of generating this sandpaper bass collection. Each of the five main bass setups has been used to create a set of loops across eight tempos and have been captured as a set of seven multisamples. The seventh multisample is a variant of the Teisco short-scale bass and Mutron III. The latter’s setting were regularly switched between bassline takes and the two best were noted for multisample creation, a low-pass filter and a band-pass filter setting.”
There’s more detail – including in depth information on the instrument setups and gear used – in Rob’s PDF in the sample folder
Rough Bass Grooves
“It’s our usual routine of mixing both hardware and software to bring you some roughed up lowend tones.
“Hardware-wise we threw our Mother 32 through the rather fab Holy Island Rorschach which is a separate spluttering fuzz and multi mode filter circuit. Each is controlled on the axis with a joystick providing hands-on audio destruction. We ran our trusty Behringer TD-3 through three of our favourite pedals to rough things up: the bonkers Catalinbread Antichthon, Bugbrand Baby Bugcrusher (a sample reducer that adds a fantastic vocal edge to the acid basslines), and Glowfly Glitchwave567 which adds fuzz and a ring mod vibe.
“On the software side we ran the usual set of softsynths through both distortion and bitcrushers for that filthy, crunchy sound but also rinsed the Audiothing Wires plugin, a recreation of a Soviet-era wire recorder that brings some great ambient texture to whatever you feed it, and has been one of our go-to plugins for a while now.”