Hey everyone!
In this one, I am going to be showing you how to produce a better Bassline.
This one is the third part in the series How To Produce better EDM,
So if you’re interested in learning how to produce an awesome bassline in the style
of all the big EDM artists, to follow up the chords and melody that we’ve previously
produced, stick around.
So let's start off by just mentioning that the bassline is one of the most important
elements of your track.
And basslines can often sound really cool, but it also kind of serves as a backbone to
the overall structure of a track.
And I also do want to recommend that you watch this on speakers or studio monitors, and not
on mobile phone speakers.
Basslines often are NOT the most complex parts of the track to arrange and produce, but it
IS important to get it right, in a way that it sits well with the rest of the track, and
doesn’t really interfere with the rest of the elements, or the main drums of the track.
So that being said, there are interesting ways to make the bassline sound really solid
and strong, but also ways to still make it sound ear-catching and fun.
So as always let's pick an element first that sounds fun and we think it's going to fit
with how we are envisioning to structure this track.
Any bass element will work, and if you’re using serum for this one like me, I would
just like to trim some of the high end here right away, because I can hear there's too much of it.
Now let's arrange the notes for our bassline next.
And since we already have our chords and melody played for this track, I feel like it is now
easier to get the inspiration and come up and with a bassline to support these elements,
rather than having to come up with the bassline first in the track, right off the bat.
And, when arranging the bassline, you can do all kinds of crazy stuff with the notes
for the bass, but I would say the safest route you can go for the main core of your bassline,
is to stick around to the ROOT note of your track, and in this case, our track is in B,
and then D, F#, and E.
Unless you are really musically advanced, then you can play around with it and do some
crazy bass arrangement.
But even if you are really musically advanced, sticking around to the root note in your bass
will give it a solid sound to it, and I just think that’s a good core to build around
on, on any track.
Ok so we got our notes for the bass now, and I’m just going to lower them down to the C3 scale.
And this is going to be our sub later.
For now let's just give it some tempo and rhythm to bring some animation to this bassline,
just like the rest of the elements.
So I’m not even going to leave our root note, just giving it a little bit of personality
by cutting up the notes, and placing them in a different rhythm.
*plays*
Okay, that’s good enough for the arrangement.
I can already hear there's a lot of high end on this bass, so I do want to trim that, but
we will take care of that later.
The next thing I want to do right away is add this bass to our mixer, and since this
is going to be our sub-bass, I will select an EQ here, and trim the HIGH end
all the way to 140 or so.
Because you do NOT want the sub to interfere with the bass or the other elements, instead,
just to give your track a strong low-end core.
And the next thing will be adding it to mono, and we can also add any bass compression to
do some work with the dynamic range.
The next thing is adding a sidechain, and a sidechain is even more important when it
comes to your sub and bass since this is where most of the interference between the low elements
like your bass and kick happens.
And they’re basically fighting for a spot.
So, for now, let's just add a kickstart sidechain to this element, and later I will even show
you how you can add a sidechain by using the fruity limiter if you don’t already know
how to do that, and that will be included in the next video, once we arrange the kick
and drums for this track.
Let’s just go with 100% on this.
So since this is our sub, I do want to create a separate element that is going to represent
the higher frequencies of our bassline.
So the first thing I will do is create a clone of this sub, in the channel rack.
We can now choose a different preset for the sound of the bassline, or use the same one.
That’s up to you.
And now, I will also want to create another pattern in the piano roll.
And just for clarification, I will name this one “bass” and the other one “sub”
so we can get a better distinction.
You can now copy the notes of the sub bassline that we arranged and put them here in this pattern.
Now we can route this to a mixer track.
And in the EQ here, what we want to do is trim the low end all the way up to 140 Hz,
so that this bassline doesn’t interfere with our sub-bass and the whole track doesn’t get muddy.
I also want to trim the high end by quite a bit, because I feel like there is a LOT
of high frequencies in this bass element that is just unnecessary and will just interfere
with the rest of our elements.
Next, we can add a compression here as well, to try and tame the dynamic range
and give it tightness.
And we will also add the kickstart sidechain here as well, since we definitely want to
have that sidechain silence effect at the beginning of each bar, to leave out some space
for the kick later.
Okay, so let's hear how the progress with the track sounds now, when we play both our
bass elements, and our chords and melody.
And I will just turn down our lead a little bit, so we can get a better idea of
how the bassline sounds.
*example of track so far*
Let’s not worry too much about mixing now, we will do a mixdown again later in the next
videos in the series once we have all of our track elements in place.
So that’s it for this one.
I hope you’ve enjoyed watching this or learned a thing or two about basslines.
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And as always…
Thanks for watching!