When kicks become basses
Imagine elongating an 808 kick sample so that it went from being a characteristic short thud to something more sustained. Suddenly its pitch would be more readily identifiable and you’d have – as if by magic – a sound which was far more like a bass synth than a drum. This technique has become extremely popular in a variety of different forms of dance music, with hip-hop, trap and garage producers among those to experiment with the technique.
Rather than reverse-engineering a kick sample to identify loop points, most of those producers employ a different technique: to design synth parts which build drum-like tones with longer envelope times to shape them into basslines. In this month’s video, we’ve done exactly that, using Reaktor Blocks to build a sound from scratch to be used as a starting point for just such as bassline. As always, the oscillator stage feeds a filter which, in turn, will require an amplifier. But what truly helps shape an appropriate sound is a dedicated envelope assigned to each of these three modules.
A pitch envelope will be required to produce a characteristic ‘bite’ at the start of the note – synth drums often sound best if they bend from sharp to flat, quickly, as each note plays. The filter will allow you to ‘purify’ the oscillator waveform you choose, by stripping out harmonic content you don’t need and, again, having an envelope to control this, providing a brighter tone at the beginning of the note which then decays, will often produce more powerful synth drums. You’ll also need an envelope assigned to the amplifier to ensure that the overall volume shape of the note is as required. The amplifier envelope settings are often the biggest difference between synth sounds designed to produce kick drums, and those designed to produce the kinds of basslines heard in trap and some hip-hop – the decay phase is often much longer, and with that extended note length comes greater pitch recognition.
We’ve skipped an important consideration, though, which is discussing which oscillators produce the best bass tones in this context. The triangle waves which you associate with 808-style kicks are a great place to start, as they’ll produce sine-wave-like power, without the ‘lack of weight’ that sine tones can produce; remember, these have no harmonic content. If you want something raspier, square and pulse waves can produce much more aggression, particularly if you employ pulse width modulation. As ever, combining oscillators can provide more weight still, particularly if there is a straightforward way to mix their relative volumes to get a balance you like.
We’ve done exactly that in the video, building a first, triangle wave oscillator, which is then joined by a raspier, square wave. The other advantage of a modular system becomes clear here too, as the best results for our layered kick/bass synth comes when we tailor the envelope settings so that they’re independent for the two oscillators, meaning that we effectively have six envelopes in use by the time we’re finished. If you don’t have the means to work that way, don’t worry. Instead, build a first bassline in your chosen synth plugin and then duplicate this onto another software instrument track to build an accompanying sound separately. Remember that you can then group these sounds together before applying processing to both – compression, EQ and transient shaping, in particular – meaning that you should soon have a window-shaking bassline.
The triangle waves associated with 808-style kicks are a great place to start