http://www.bomelakiesie.co.za/viewtopic.php?t=19643&highlight=
Hey all
I've been so busy with tours lately and I'm not in SA very much at the moment, so I thought I'd start getting a bit more active in the forums again. Hopefully I can be of some help to some of you, plus Im bored as hell sitting in a hotel room in Sao Paulo and my macbook has a crap video card so I cant play games to pass the time... Wink
So anyway, thought I'd run through some of my techniques and tips when writing tunes in my studio, and i'll start off with basslines for this post as that seems to be a starting point for most peeps.
I'm using Cubase 4, but I'm sure these tips could apply to users of other software as well.
Lately, most of my bass lines consist of two or three parts, or layers, usually split in to the main bass line, and one or two mid bass parts. I find layering to be the best way to get anything sounding big and more interesting, specially in a world where we've all become accustomed to just using presets from rather thin sounding VST plugins. Don't go overboard though or you'll end up with a messy mix. Simple is usually better. Try duplicating the midi tracks and assigning different sounds to play the same notes.
Main Bass Line
When it comes to the main bass line, it has to be rock solid. Its the driving force holding everything together in a track and needs to be 100 %. I usually turn to plugins for this simply because the envelopes are usually tighter, and I like to leave these tracks as a instrument track right until the end of writing the tune rather than bouncing to audio. Funnily enough, I've often found that the really simple, and sometimes crappy VST's can be great for this kinda stuff with a bit of work. My personal favs though...
Linplug Cronox 2 (not 3, dont like it at all) - seem to be using this loads
Spectrasonics Trilogy - Check out the saw waves (the prophet wave is particularly nice)
UHE Filterscape
I usually just use a single saw oscillator (you can add a sine or sub pulse if you need extra bottom, but I find with the high bpm stuff it usually just causes problems in the mix) with the LP filter set to zero and quite a high envelope modulation amount, with a tight decay. Easy and simple. The hardest part now, is getting stuff to sit right.
Thats where my favorite plugin of all time comes in, Quadrafuzz. Don't know what I'd do without this baby. Stick it on your bass without even touching any controls and you'll already hear things tightening and fattening up. I actually don't do to many drastic edits with this, but it depends on what you're working on, my partner Tamir from Atomic Pulse uses insane levels on each of the eq bands, and then turns down the master gain to lessen the distortion and it works for him, although usually with different plugins (he uses the Big Tick Rainbow quite often)
Next up is a decent compressor. I like to use the Sonalksis Comps for this. They're not the most transparent compressors, but they do have a nice "twang" for things like electronic bass lines. I normally use a ratio between 3:1 and 5:1 with hard knee enabled, and set the threshold according to how much I need to squash the bass. There is a nice feature called "crush" which you can play with as well of you're looking for a harder sound. Also, fiddling with the attack will allow you to tweak that "click" in the attack of the sound a bit.
Now down to the eq. A lot of people don't spend nearly enough time with this and its the most important effect in your arsenal. You really need to listen carefully, and dont just listen on solo, you need to hear in context with the rest of the tune. I often come back to the eq several times during writing a tune to tweak things if I have added new sounds or key changes.
Its difficult to give you examples of this as its always different from track to track, and from sound to sound, but I'll give you a good starting point I use quite often. In Cubase, I start with the lo eq, and I usually leave this set to Hi Pass II as it enables the q. I usually just slope off stuff from about 30 or 40 hertz, leaving a gentle bell at around 50 to 60. Lo mid, or eq 2 I put at around 80 with a fair amount of q, not too much but enough to bring out the lo stuff along with a bit of punch. Then I cut out a bit around 400 - 500hz with eq 3, again a fair bit of bandwidth, but not too much gain as to hollow the sound out. This usually leaves a nice gap for the mid bass which comes later. Finally I change the high shelving to parametric, and give a small peak anywhere from 3k to 6k, just to define the tops a bit, but be careful in that range, to much gain there can be a problem.
Mid Bass
This is where you can really get creative with your bass lines. Bass lines are usually quite mono sounding as you loose punch if you go to stereo. This is where the mid bass sounds come in for me as I can really spread these out over the stereo field without loosing the drive from my lo end. There are chorus plugins that will let you chorus just the high end of your main bass line but I've never found one that does the job properly. I prefer to rather have a different sound all together. For this you can use pretty much anything you want, but I often get these sound from Atmosphere and NI's Massive, or from why Virus and Blofeld.
I follow pretty much the same procedure as before, adding quadrafuzz and a compressor, but the eq is a bit different. I usually cut the lo at about 80hz to 140hz depending on the sound, and I don't take out the lo mids around 500. Fiddle around with this until you've got the sound sitting with the bass comfortably, but still with enough separation to differentiate between the two parts.
The next step helps with the seperation. Now I usually go stereo with these sounds and there is a number of ways I do this. One is a ping pong delay. The cubase one works well, as well as my other favourite, Bionic Delay (think this is, or used to be, a free plugin, its a copy of the stereo delay from Logic - do a search on kvraudio and you should find it). Just don't use too much feeback or you'll end up with a mess, just keep enough to enhance the stereo. Another is using a chorus or similar effect. I don't like the standard chorus in cubase too much, but I often use the mono to stereo plugin in cubase. Its designed to work on mono material but it seems to do the job on stereo stuff for me just fine. The waves doubler plugin works fantasically as well, but the waves stuff is hell of a expensive to buy, so another great way to get a good stereo double sound is to duplicate the channel you are working with, then pan one hard right (depending on how much spread you want) and the other hard left, then set the delay in the inspector window (the one on the left of the screen in cubase) to about 10 to 20 milliseconds and voila, instant big, wide, stereo sounds!
Last few tips... regarding key changes in a track. Your settings often depend on the key you're working in, especially the eq's. So if you are gonna do key switches in a track, be careful you don't suddenly have a massive booming bass, or silly thin sounding bass, when you drop from an A to F for example. Best way to remedy this is to bounce your tracks to audio at the end of the track when you do the mixdown, and split your channels in to loops of one key only. That way you can separately eq the bass when its in one key, and do another eq for another key etc etc. thus keeping the energy of your bass the same through any changes.
Another handy tip, which I do with percussion as well, is route your bass channels to a group. That way when you're changing levels or adding filters and things, you only have to work with one channel.
Ok, thats it. Hope that helps some peeps here. I'll try answer some any questions I can here, when I'm around, and hopefully I can do another tut on something else soon. Let me know what you guys want to know.
Cheers
Nate
. Do you have any other link besides that one to your music, maybe a myspace or soundcloud adress?
