Hey all, I'm new to producing, probably 6 months into it seriously. I'm still learning the ropes. My inspiration draws from artists like Flume, Ta-Ku, L D R U, HUCCI, Purity Ring, etc... I have a couple of questions about producing clean sounding bass. I'm trying to recreate some of these crisp basslines but in my programs and synths (Ableton, Sylenth1 and Massive *all paid for lol*) I just cant do it. Simple Sin patches pitched octaves down still won't get what I'm after and they seem to be fairly straight forward sounding sounds.
Can anyone explain to me the keys for having clean bass in my music? Other problems I run into is the bass sounding huge and not clear when making the sound, and then barely audible in the actual track. Is this due to the mixdown, or is it because the beats audio on my computer translates it poorly into my monitors?
Here are examples of the bass sounds:
0:11, the funky bassline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7-yAX9ijuM
0:47, you hear it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvq7z0DXElA
0:13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIMborUufZU
and pretty much any HUCCI song
Tips for having clean bass! Anything is recommended! SOS!
-
- KVRist
- Topic Starter
- 67 posts since 13 Aug, 2014
-
- KVRist
- Topic Starter
- 67 posts since 13 Aug, 2014
no one?
-
- KVRian
- 1256 posts since 15 Mar, 2007 from Yorkshire, England
One of the problems with bass you touched on is making it translate across different listening systems. You want a nice deep bass to fill a club but also want someone listening on a basic system with little bass end to hear it. One solution is to make sure your bass has high frequencies and a good way to do that is to add harmonics. There are some plugins specifically made to do this. Other than that remove a bit of mud in low mids, duck the bass with kick and make sure they are not in the same frequency area. You can also carve some of the kick frequency (as it does not move) out of the bass. Arrangement is an issue as well of course, make sure the bass is not being masked by other instruments with low frequencies when it is playing
-
- KVRAF
- 4065 posts since 2 Jul, 2005
Clean bass is tricky and involves making room for the bass elements you want to have the most impact by making sure this impact is not present in other sounds you are using. All I heard going on in the lowest two octaves in your examples was the kick ( but not to a great extent it was more present in the low mids. And a simple clean bass sound. I would recommend a simple fm patch or maybe just a sine wave run through something that will generate higher harmonics such as the waves rbass or just a nice versatile saturation plugin. Also be sure to keep your kick under control. If you want the low bass to take the lead then you should make sure that the frequencies where the kick and bass conflict with one another are as small as possible. I can't recommend multiband transient processors enough. I use the Melda MMultibandTransient and it's fantastic for cleaning up a kick so that it barely punches through the baseline because the frequency range where they overlap has been cut back to basically just the initial transient.
Don't F**K with Mr. Zero.
-
- KVRAF
- 2989 posts since 5 Nov, 2014
Use saw instead and lower filter cut off, EQ-it something like HPF from 40-50hz and LPF arround 1khz or whenever sounds good, compress it, HPF everything else except kick from 150hz and up, if you bass is not fat/phat enough, boost low end or try distortion or that drive that Sylenth have or change source and that enhancer like RBass tip from above is good tip also.
