I can never get a BASSY sounding bass on THE DROP

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Hey! Whenever I make a new track, the bass is never BASSY/PUMPING enough. It's like it has no power. I tried lots of techniques including layering but I can never get it to sound like it's actually a DROP.

This is keeping me stuck for years. I need help. Please.

https://soundcloud.com/user-42476094/ns ... U8gWxLu48l

Here is what the DROP currently sounds like. It's weak and it lacks bass power... no matter what samples I choose it's like I can never get a good sounding bass. It's really frustrating!

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Well the part from 0:09 - 0:38 sounded really thick and heavy, very BASSY

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Compression and some saturation will help, also don’t forget to add a higher frequency component to your bass sounds. It will act as an attention grabber for your bass sounds. Mostly, though, your composition is very bland and has the vibe of a corporate video to sell timeshare properties. That’s your bigger problem, imo.
Zerocrossing Media

4th Law of Robotics: When turning evil, display a red indicator light. ~[ ●_● ]~

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1st, it's not my genre, but I think the bass sounds like a boring sine, pretty much.
No character. A sine is sometimes put an octave below regular bass.

Am G C Dm, something about the bass being alone a 5th from root of chords, like zerocrossing said add something an octave following bass. It's very lonely. If chords have 5th as root note or something.

One cool bass plugin is Waves MaxxBass that adds a harmonic to bass that expands that, kind of. Get some real synth bass sound with some attack would be enough.

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Masterofdisaster wrote: Wed May 31, 2023 3:28 pm Well the part from 0:09 - 0:38 sounded really thick and heavy, very BASSY
Was listening like “Well this DROPPED… off a cliff…” lol. My mistake was looking at the waveform and concluding there was a bit of the buildup before the drop lol.

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I think you have some way to go, before you start worrying about the power of your drops.
The first thing I noticed was how wrong the kick sounds.
Probably a mix of bad sample choice and lack of overall compression.
But that kick doesn't sound right at all. Just doesn't sound stable.

Does the bass synth have oscillator retrigger switched on? If it doesn't, then the bass notes will cause the kick to play at different volumes on every hit, due to phasing.

If it's on, umm... are you using a kick loop from an EDM pack which is designed for light pop dance, and you have given it too much sub? :shrug:

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_al_ wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 4:09 am I think you have some way to go, before you start worrying about the power of your drops.
Idk, I thought so too at first but upon second listen, I can hear this as some RPG video game track lol.

Like when you first arrive at a new village and gotta find the village elder who’s daughter you ran into previously and she was like “Our village is being attacked by monsters every day! My father said he will pay 1,000 gold coins to any adventurer who can defeat them!”

You, the young adventurer Myke Flies, have just arrived at BASSY Village and set out to find village elder DRÖP!

Tell me this doesn’t scream “village background music”?!
https://soundcloud.com/user-42476094/ns ... U8gWxLu48l

Hint: DRÖP is located in the hut at the northeast corner of BASSY Village.
Last edited by i need Help on Thu Jun 01, 2023 7:32 am, edited 1 time in total.

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OH SNAP! You encountered some monsters! Queue the Battle music!

https://soundcloud.com/user-42476094/untitled

OH SNAP! You defeated the monsters! Queue the victory music!

https://soundcloud.com/user-42476094/p-2

OP, forget the main stage, I wanna hear your music on the Big Boss stage lol.

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i need Help wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 7:04 am I can hear this as some RPG video game track lol.
Hehe, when I started making music, I also had people telling me it would sound good in a computer game :D

Was actually pretty hurtful, if I remember right :x

That was one of my earliest lessons, teaching me that making club music is an entirely different mindset to making what most other people call "music"

You start creating stuff with structure, melodies, melodic transitions etc, and immediately it no longer has that "cool kids" club vibe

Took me another 10 years to be good enough at dance music AND be to able to slip good sounding melody into it :help:

That said, I didn't have YouTube or even internet when I started (poor kid living in bedsits lol)

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This guy lays out some ideas for how to saturate. Maybe the concept of the phantom fundamental (maybe 3/4 through video) would help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQPYMfcPzY0
Doing nothing is only fun when you have something you are supposed to do.

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_al_ wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 7:30 pm Hehe, when I started making music, I also had people telling me it would sound good in a computer game.
Same lol. I guess it’s true what they say, “Hurt people hurt people”. But I mean I wish I could make music that takes you to another time and place like in video games. That’s a skill not to be looked down upon!

And I really don’t say it mean spirited, it’s like 9 seconds long so gotta imagined it looped and arranged more but the audio clip in the OP got this kinds vibe IMO, and this is one of my favorite OST tracks:

https://youtu.be/SbGXut9215E
(Freakin love those string stabs at 2:17 lol)
_al_ wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 7:30 pm That said, I didn't have YouTube or even internet when I started (poor kid living in bedsits lol)
Also same. Well, I didn’t have the internet as it is today for music producers at least.

PTL too lol, I’d hate to be starting out or learning the core concepts now days, but that’s another rant-y conversation lol.

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i need Help wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 6:04 am I’d hate to be starting out or learning the core concepts now days, but that’s another rant-y conversation lol.
Oooh, that's a weird perspective!
I always considered today's lot to be really lucky tbh. I mean reeeeally lucky.
If they have a problem or just an interest in some technique or mechanic, they can just open up Google, and bam. Like magic, they are able to do something they couldn't do before.

Take for example, hi-passing things that are not kick or bass. I probably made music for at least 5 years or something, wondering why my tracks were never the same volume as other stuff, and why bass was always messy and muddy.

I actually learned to do these things by trial and error. After years of slaving alone with my setup.

If I started now, that info would probably be in the first "how to edm" tutorial I found lol

But yeah, doing things on my own has given me some weird techniques that I don't see other people doing, and it also gave me the stamina to push on, when most people would have said "fk this"

So yeah, plusses and minuses for sure :D

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mykeflies wrote: Wed May 31, 2023 3:17 pm Hey! Whenever I make a new track, the bass is never BASSY/PUMPING enough. It's like it has no power. I tried lots of techniques including layering but I can never get it to sound like it's actually a DROP.

This is keeping me stuck for years. I need help. Please.

https://soundcloud.com/user-42476094/ns ... U8gWxLu48l

Here is what the DROP currently sounds like. It's weak and it lacks bass power... no matter what samples I choose it's like I can never get a good sounding bass. It's really frustrating!
This helped me a lot about bass (it's for Psytrance but has validity for all basslines IMHO):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJEnCLX2nPA

All the other tutorials, I found so far were too simple, but this guy is pointing the right things out.

BTW - your example doesn't sound like a drop at all, it sounds rather like a bridge, so you might consider to find an arrangment, where with the drop, you throw all in , you have.

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SamDi wrote: Sat Jun 17, 2023 8:07 pm
BTW - your example doesn't sound like a drop at all, it sounds rather like a bridge, so you might consider to find an arrangment, where with the drop, you throw all in , you have.
You're right with what you say about arrangement, but I think, to master drops, you first have to understand what it is that gives them that power.

And this is the thing that a lot of people struggle with.
Having a good drop is not just about having everything loud and attention-grabbing.
For example, look at old psytrance techniques.
The break and build-up would have lots of intense noises, wooshy things, mangled reverbed vocals...
But then.. the drop hits you with just kick and bass. Nothing else.
And it sounds fat as fk.

So this is the thing. You need to look at all the elements that are contained in your drop, and then, during the buildup leading to the drop, you start taking these elements away, until, just before the drop, it sounds almost an exact opposite of the drop that's about to kick in.

But it's not always about bass, volume, frequency etc.
You can also create a powerful drop artfully, by using lets say, a freaky repetitive loop that plays through the track.
Then when you come to the break, you start to add some subtle effects to that loop over some time and fade it out or filter it slowly.

Then, at the drop, the loop comes back in it's full trippy vibe, no fx, along with the kick and bass, which is enough to make you feel "this is it"
Doing things like that, you can even create the effects of a drop, without even having to take the kick / bass away.

It's a tricky thing to master, and does usually involve removing at least some bass from the breakdown, but there is usually a bit more to it than just bass levels.

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