Whether you’re producing electronic music in the broadest sense or looking to bring a distinctive low-end foundation to your band recordings, these techniques and ideas will get your synthesised basslines booming.
Choose The Right Synth
Get off on the right foot in your synth bass design endeavours by choosing the most appropriate kind of synthesiser for the sound you’re working on. For fat, warm tones of the kind you might hear in techno and house, fire up an analogue instrument such as u-he Diva, Lennar Digital Sylenth1, the Roland TB-303 or SH-101, Novation BassStation or Arturia Mini V.
When you want something a little edgier, an FM synth along the lines of Native Instruments FM-8 or Waves Flow Motion will do the trick. And if EDM, drum ’n’ bass or any other form of bass music is your genre of choice, get your wavetable on with the likes of Xfer Records Serum, Reveal-Sound Spire, Native Instruments Massive (the original over the less gut-punching Massive X), u-he Hive 2, Sugar Bytes Cyclop or Vengeance Sound VPS-Avenger. Oh, and let’s not forget the essential TR-808 kick drum, which is the de facto standard for hip-hop and trap.
Naturally, none of this is written in stone, so don’t be shy about trying any bass synth you like in any context. And why not combine multiple synths of different kinds in an Instrument Rack or Track Stack for all manner of huge hybrid bass sounds?
Think About The Genre
In dance and electronic music, as well as establishing the styling and sound of the bass (see above), the musical genre also tends to dictate the rhythmic and melodic direction of the notes that play it. Witness, for example, the off-beat quarter-notes of classic trance, the sustained Reeses of jungle and drum ’n’ bass, the wild modulations of EDM, and the bouncing 808s of trap.
While you don’t have to adhere to the rules of the genre if you don’t want to, it’s a good idea to understand what the audience will be expecting for any given style and keep it in mind at all times. So if you’re working in a musical form that you don’t normally frequent, do some research online to get a handle on its low-end fundamentals, rather than coming at the bassline from your own assumptions.
Look Beyond The Piano Roll
While your DAW’s piano roll editor gives you total flexibility when it comes to programming MIDI note data, synth basslines – being, as they often are, intrinsically cyclical and metronomic – make especially good candidates for step sequencing. If your synth has a step sequencer or similar system (Massive’s Performer LFO, for example) onboard, the combination of sound design and focused note/pitch programming/modulation within a unified interface makes for a highly compelling and effective workflow. And many DAWs feature their own built-in pattern sequencers, facilitating step-based programming of any synth.
With their button-operated note placement, accenting, note ties/slurs, swing control, parameter modulation and all the rest of it, step sequencers are a supremely creative option for programming synthetic basslines.
Sidechain To The Kick
These days, sidechain compression is an ubiquitous production technique in all styles of music, and one of the most common use cases for it is briefly attenuating the volume level of the bass whenever the kick drum plays, thereby allowing the beat to cut through, and keeping the low end of the mix tight and punchy. This is of maximum relevance to synth bass, being potentially more bottom-heavy than its electric and acoustic counterparts.
There are actually a few ways to achieve this ducking effect, including volume automation in the host DAW, and dedicated plugins such as Nicky Romero Kickstart and Xfer Records LFO Tool. The traditional approach, though, is to insert a compressor on the bass channel, and route the kick drum into its sidechain input via a send in the mixer, so that it triggers compression every time it hits. If your bass is quite frequency-rich, extending up into the mids (see below), a multiband compressor enables ducking of just the low frequencies without affecting the rest of the signal.
With your compressor in place, tweak the threshold, ratio and envelope timings to shape the bassline ducking as befits the kick drum and track in general. Extreme settings deliver to sort of overt pumping effect so beloved of EDM producers, but even at small ratios, the low frequency clearance that sidechain compression can achieve is quite remarkable.
Layer In A Sub
For dance and pop music in particular, you’ll often (if not usually) want to include a sub layer in your bass patch, whether generated by one of your main synth’s oscillators, or via a second one stacked underneath it. Sine, square and triangle waveforms are all viable options: you’ll get the smoothest, most easy-to-blend sub from a sine, but more in the way of harmonics and interest from a square or triangle, so experiment to see what works best with the primary bass tone. And be careful with the volume level: unless your monitoring set up includes a subwoofer, you won’t hear much below 40 or 50Hz, so use a spectrum analyser to see what’s happening down there. And consider applying a high-pass filter at somewhere around 20-30Hz to prevent the largely inaudible lowest frequencies taking up valuable headroom.
Make Your Presence Felt
Disregarding pure subs, listen to any well made bassline and you’ll hear that there’s much more to it than just low end. The definition, bite and character of a bass sound are found in the low mids and even up into the high frequency range, and it’s these areas that also ensure the part can be heard on smaller playback systems. So, play around with the octave settings on your oscillators, or add secondary synths in higher registers, and use filters and EQ to get a good, rich spectral balance – a gentle, wide EQ boost around 750Hz to 1.5kHz can work wonders.
Mix In A Bass Guitar
Just as layering acoustic drum samples in with drum machine sounds can dramatically improve the dynamics and energy of a beat, so working a recorded or sampled electric (or even upright) bass into your synth b-line will enhance its character and bolster the attack stage, particularly if that bass is of the slapped variety. Simply get your bass player to play the same line as the synth is playing, or, if you’re using a sampler, copy the MIDI notes from the synth track over to the sampler track (you might to transpose them up or down and octave, depending on the pitching of your plugins).
Key to the effectiveness of this technique is finding the optimum balance between the electric and synth basses to allow the first to have impact without compromising the overall ‘electronic’ sound of the part as a whole. Start by getting the volume level of the synth where you want it in the mix, then bring the electric bass up from zero until you find the sweet spot at which it contributes to the sound but isn’t discretely identifiable – unless you want it to be, of course. Gluing the two layers together is then easily done by routing both to bus or group channel, then applying EQ and compression to taste.
How do you tackle your synth basslines? Let us know in the comments.
Bass Guitar Photo by Laura Nyhuis on Unsplash