Hardstyle for the masses!

When Blasterjaxx and Harris & Ford work together, it is very clear where the journey is headed: „Bassman“is a massive hardstyle anthem that is guaranteed to get the crowd going wild. Here parts with naive and catchy vocals alternate with driving drops with an ecstatic hookline. Reason enough to listen to the drop in detail.

1

Brute beat

With a loud bass drum, a clap sound and an open hi-hat on every quarter count, the beat of „Bassman“is as simple as it is brutal. A dull, distorted sawtooth bass complements the groove on the off-beat, i.e. every second eighth count. We reproduce this sound with DUNE 3 [1]. The „Init Patch“is a good basis.

2

Bass sound

Set polyphony to mono and activate the limiter. So that oscillator 2 can also be heard, we set the level in the mixer as shown and increase the density value of oscillator 2 to 1. Tune oscillator 1 one octave and oscillator 2 two octaves lower and also increase the detune value of the second oscillator easily.

3

Bass: effects

We reduce the filter frequency (cutoff) to 53%. For a bit more bite, activate the distortion effect, choose the grunge type and set drive to 35%. The sound gets the desired pumping effect through the sidechain plug-in Cableguys Kickstart [2]. We add a hypnotic eighth note sequence that follows the notes of the bassline.

4 Sequence

The sound can be quickly programmed with a VA synth or an analog emulation such as Arturia Mini 3 V [3]. Start with the preset “1osc”. The sawtooth waveform of the virtual Minimoog already provides a suitable basic sound. Reduce the filter frequency as shown and turn the sustain control of the filter envelope fully up.

5 Hookline

A pinch of reverb makes the sound more spacious. Also with hardstyle, a gripping hookline is essential. And “Bassman” does everything right: The melody is short, crisp and memorable and can be whistled perfectly. Particularly striking are the octave leap at the beginning of bar 1 and the descending sequence of notes in the last bar.

6 Layering

The four-bar hookline returns to the root note D in the last bar. This makes it seem closed in itself and you want to hear it again and again. For a particularly massive sound, you can layer several supersaw sounds such as the presets „LD EDM Saw Chords“, „LD Big Saw 2“and „LG Giga EDM Stack“from Vengeance Sound Avenger [4].