The secret of the bass

In the great EDMtips FeedbackFriday round I’ve posted my track Out Of Touch.

As always, the other guys gave me awesome support and lots of helpful advices. But there has been this one question from Dicky Vendetta:

Love the bass used here! Tell me your secret :))))))

Never thought I could ever tell a secret about music production 😀

But maybe this could actually be helpful to see what I’ve made. Here we go.

There is one bass track with 4 instrument racks in it. So the midi notes are triggering four instruments at the same time. 3 standard ableton wavetable synths and 1 Fabfilter Twin. The whole track is routed in the “kickbassbus”, where it’s compressed with the kick drum.

Now let’s have a closer look into the instrument racks. The first one is the main bass. As you can see, I took a standard preset and tweaked it. This instance is straight in the center with activated sub bass. No unison. Short decay to become punchy and straight in the face. The filters are modulated by LFO, but mainly concentrating on the bass frequencies.

The both next layers are for making the bass phatter. They’re an octave up and panned hard left and right. I also varied the waveforms a bit.

The fourth layer is a Fabfilter Twin. This is an additional layer for adding more punch in the upper midrange. As you can see, there are a square and a sawtooth wave, again with short decay. To separate it from the other layers, I put an EQ after it, getting rid of the sub and top frequencies.

Now, let’s have a look on the processing chain. I start with a Fabfilter Saturn to add some Harmonics and Saturation. Second, I get rid of the sub bass, letting the kick enough space. Additionaly, I looked after the critical kick frequency (46 Hz) and took this down. Third thing is the Sonnox Inflator, adding again Harmonics to bring everything more upfront.

Next one, I took the Scheps73 EQ to add even more mid and high frequencies. This EQ is great for a vintage and musical analog texture. Followed by another Fabfilter EQ cutting sub and high frequencies off. Then, I bring all things up with a Shadow Hill compressor. This one is for mastering purpose, but also great on busses.

The final plugins on the chain are a sidechain compressor that makes space for the kick. Finally, there’s a limiter, but this is only to catch some transients, not to pump the volume up.

That are all the secrets I can tell 😀 Hope you liked it and it gave you some helpful hints for your way to pro level.

Happy producing!