Psytrance basslines

[suthnear]

Also it seems that everybody but me resamples the basslines

I find it interesting that people still do that. In the olden days, the reasons for this were to free up a hardware synth to be used on another part and - as you've all been discussing - to stabilise and enhance the bass sound since you could pick the best sounding notes as your samples. I guess nowadays it's the same except that it's to free up CPU rather than an entire synth. Also, samplers offer a final possibility for envelope shaping as well, which is sometimes quite useful. Or maybe it's a cargo cult

the old Quadrafuzz in Cubase has some very special crossovers messing up the phase in some magic way

I ran out the demo ages ago, but dmgaudio's limitless is probably also worth checking out for this sort of thing

[PieBerger]

Thanks for listening

Yes, multiband processing seems to be commonly used for psybass. There is a kind of "urban legend" that the old Quadrafuzz in Cubase has some very special crossovers messing up the phase in some magic way.

Also it seems that everybody but me resamples the basslines

Not the only one I bounce my bass parts as I go along to force me to move forward, but I don't resample individual notes. I tend to write fairly melodic basslines and resampling each note everytime I want to edit the bass patch is just far too time consuming.

[andymcbain]

I find it interesting that people still do that. In the olden days, the reasons for this were to free up a hardware synth to be used on another part and - as you've all been discussing - to stabilise and enhance the bass sound since you could pick the best sounding notes as your samples. I guess nowadays it's the same except that it's to free up CPU rather than an entire synth. Also, samplers offer a final possibility for envelope shaping as well, which is sometimes quite useful. Or maybe it's a cargo cult

Definitely a historical thing for me... old habits die hard! I think in a superstitious way, I just don't trust the synth to give me a consistent result every time. It's probably quite irrational but I never saw music production as an entirely rational process...

Also at the beginning I was convinced you *had* to use copious EQ, distortion and compression to get a "big" sounding bass. The EQ was all surgical stuff on particular harmonics, and compression was easier to control when working with single notes and bouncing them to audio afterwards.

Now I realise you don't really have to bother with any of that...