Sound designing your bassline
It’s clear from the walkthroughs we’ve featured that EQ is a hugely important tool when it comes to sculpting kick and bass sounds and, of course, other instruments should be treated with similar care. If you’ve played in a pad sound with both hands, it’s likely that the bottom notes of your left hand will be triggering some deep frequencies, so if you’re hearing unwanted rumble in your mix having addressed kick and bass instruments, search around for other offenders.
This is also true at the output stage if you’re mastering your own tracks. Any self-respecting mastering engineer will make EQ an essential part of their mastering chain, often using multiple instances (pre and post other effects such as compression, stereo enhancement etc) to get tone under control.
However, sometimes the bass sound your track needs isn’t a sculpting of the bass synth you’ve designed at the programming stage (of which more shortly) but rather a combination of this in parallel with other effects. Remember, there are two ways of bringing effects treatments to any sounds in your mix, including bass. The first is via insert effects, which are particularly well suited to sounds which require ‘whole-sound’ sculpting. EQ is a good example; if you’re choosing which frequencies to cut or boost within your bass sound, you’re likely to want the entire sound to be effected, rather than a portion of it. Similarly, compressing your whole bass sound will help you get its dynamics under control, not just through a recorded bass phrase but through the behaviour of each bass note individually as well.
Alongside ‘whole sound’ insert effects, parallel auxiliary channels can provide a great opportunity to enhance and personalise basslines. In the Adding Parallel Treatments To Bass Sounds walkthrough below, you can see and hear how to bring parallel distortion and compression effects to life on your bass sounds. Distortion and saturation plug-ins are particularly useful ways of introducing higher frequency content to ‘purer’ bass sounds, providing a useful way of gluing the bottom-end of your mix to higher frequency sounds.
However, whether you need to enrich your bass sound with such treatments will mainly come down to how that sound has been designed in the first place. If you’re working with synth bass, the options for shaping your bass sound are likely to be rich and varied. The oscillator stage of a synth allows you to shape its harmonic ‘footprint’, with a sine wave choice here restricting that to just a single ‘fundamental’ frequency. Other oscillator choices will almost inevitably include sawtooth (all integer harmonics) and square (odd-numbered harmonics only) waves, among several others.
That’s not to say that choosing one of these shapes will guarantee a considerably thicker bass sound than a sine wave, as the filter stage will determine how many of those harmonics will be heard. As you’ll see in the Bassline Filter Envelope
Shaping walkthrough, setting an envelope to ‘open’ the beginning of a bass note so that it has a bright, punchy start, before it becomes a deeper, more ‘sine-like’ sound for the rest of the note, can be highly effective.
However, things get more exciting still when you realise that most synths will allow you to mix multiple oscillators with independent waveforms together, to create an even bigger frequency footprint. And let’s not forget that when you’ve experimented with oscillators and configured a filter shape you like, taking as much care to contour the volume stage, to produce short staccato notes, or longer, more sustained ones, is equally important.
As ever, the question of which of these techniques to try out on your bassline can only be answered by the needs of your track and your imagination. There’s nothing to stop you experimenting with any of the techniques suggested above but, of course, more interesting ones which fit your mix like a glove may well require your own, unique creative effects chains. Never be afraid to experiment.