Music Production – Bass Tips

The bass component of many popular music tracks is absolutely vital and is not just an afterthought. As a producer, you should be aware of the many styles of music that rely on a solid (if not speaker-crunching!) bass line sound. We’re going to be discussing a few tips that will help you create some fantastic bass for use in your songs and other people’s songs if you develop sound patches for virtual instruments.

One very underused method of generating bass tones is to use wind tones and some lead synth patches. Using the lower registers of these instruments and sounds can produce a wicked bass sound that lends itself well to many pop and urban styles of music. The sound may come off a little buzzy, but a little processing (low pass filters come to mind) can solve this and get you out of any messy predicament. Before long, you’ll have a jamming sound you can be proud of.

You can use electric guitar patches (and even the acoustic varieties) for the same application. The added advantage here is that even in the lower-mid regions, the sound could still pass as a pure bass sound, and the guitars generally have a very warm and welcoming presence that will help the bass sound be heard in a full mix.

Sometimes the fret needs to be added to bass sounds, especially those derived from wind instruments like the flute. You can add frets organically by adding another track and tapping the side of a guitar near a microphone to the start of every bass note. This technique is becoming more and more popular.

One element you must not have in your bass sound is reverb. Not even a little! If you use a track-wide reverb, you can still pass it over the bass line but only as long as it’s not meant to be heard but just adds some character. The bass frequencies do not sit well with reverb, and using more than a tiny, little, wee bit of reverb will quickly muddy up the track and your mastering or mixing engineer (if you don’t do this yourself) will be very angry with you! You have been warned.

I hope you’ve found this useful. Lastly, I just want to also add this: don’t overlook simple sounds. For decades, video game makers have added bass sounds using the most simple generators, and even though technology has exploded, it is still worthwhile to go with synthesized bass sounds and anything that sounds good. You don’t have to get the latest and greatest, just get what sounds good and make some wonderful music.