Music Production: Bass (Synth and Sampled)

1. Intro: Let's get talking base. Welcome to my course on music production, specifically on base, both synth bass and sampled base. Having a base sit properly in your mix can be quite difficult. And especially considering what sound system you're working with and what sort of room you're working in, these base frequencies can be quite a nuisance sometimes. So we're going to be talking about how you can approach base production from a few different angles to make sure that your base is sitting proper in the mix and that you're using the right type of base for the style that you're producing. Now, quite a bit of what we're going to talk about within this course is just going to be how to create the right type of baseline in the field of music production. What type of intervals should we be working how should my bass sound based on the complexity of other instruments, so on and so forth. We'll also be discussing ADSR settings for synth base. We're going to be talking about groove and how to make sure that you're applying the right groove, and we're also going to be talking about compressing bass, which is something that I think a lot of people get wrong, so we're going to really dial in deep within that class. Disco octaves, slash chords, portamento and pitch bends, we're going to be covering it all so that you can improve as a producer and hone in on your own style. There is going to be a class project within this course. It's going to have you use a couple of the techniques available within one of your own productions. All of those details will be covered within the class specifically on the class project. So make sure that you check out that class to get all those details before you submit. My hope is to give you a wide range of techniques that you can apply to your own base production so that whether you want to use them straight down the line, they will help you improve as a producer and ultimately dissipate the fog around any confusion you might be feeling towards base production. This course is really meant to pair well with some of the drum production courses that I've given because I believe that having a solid foundation of your rhythm section, specifically drums and bass is going to set the rest of your production in the right direction. So if you enjoy the direction of this course, I'd also recommend that you check out some of my courses on drum production so that you can pair them together and improve your rhythm section within your productions. I hope you're ready to discuss a lot of base techniques because we're about to jump in. I'll catch you in the first class. 2. Class Project: This project is really for students that are already working on active productions. What I want you to do is take the baseline from one of your productions and add at least two of the techniques provided within this course. Now, make sure that you're really choosing the techniques that you like the most, which might possibly just be from being inspired from one of the classes, or maybe you've tried applying all of them, and a couple of them really resonated with you. However, you find your favorites, I want you to take those favorites and apply them to that baseline. You're going to show me the before and the after. So export the original baseline, export the altered baseline using a couple of these techniques. If you want to do it solo and just show me the baseline or the baseline within the full production, both are totally fine, but I might recommend that you supply the one within the full production so I get the bigger picture as to what style you're working with and how that baseline works within that zone. You're going to submit this as an audio submission as a public link, something that I can easily access. You could do this through SoundCloud or Google Drive, but make sure that you're supplying me with a link so that I can view the material. Within the course description, you're also going to explain why you chose these particular techniques. My hope is that by outlining what you enjoyed about those techniques, you can start to shed some light onto your stylistic approach as a producer. At the end of the day, the production techniques that I like the most, I use over and over and over again. Now, these are techniques that other musicians have used that have influenced me in a way that I want to recreate that particular sound within my own productions. You take a bass approach from one artist, a drum approach from another, so on and so forth. Eventually, you amalgamate your own style. So instead of taking from an artist, you're going to take from this course your favorite techniques and apply those to your baseline. Now, really take your time with this project. It's not about rushing through it. And if you have any questions along the way, please feel free to reach out and ask. I hope you have fun with this class project, and I'll catch you in the next class. 3. Fit the Genre Groove: The ball. A. Alright, let's start off with talking about how to pick the right type of bass sound based on the style that you are producing. Should you work with sampled bass? Should you work with a synth base? This is what we're talking about in this class. Let's dive in. So, first off, generally, if you're working in electronic genres, you're going to be working with synth bass, sometimes sampled bass, and if you're working in more acoustic genres, you're going to be working with sample base, but sometimes synth base. In other words, both of these types of basses are going to permeate into each other's worlds. Think about some modern rock bands like the band Muse. They very often use synthesis within a rock setting. So while they play more of an acoustic genre, you're still going to find plenty of synth, in this case, synth bass within that sort of style. Similarly, if you're looking at certain types of hip hop that are primarily electronic, you'll still often hear acoustic kits and acoustic bass samples within even the more electronic version of that genre. So straight out the gate, you may want to ask yourself, who am I influenced by? If it's someone like Danger Mouse, for example, while he's doing electronic music production, but in a way that sounds acoustic. Or if you're influenced by someone like dead Mouse, for example, you may want to really lean into understanding synthesis and the electronic side of things. So simply put, ask yourself, what style do I want to be producing? Who do I look to the most within that genre as a big influence, and how have they approached their use of Synth or sampled base. Now, before I continue to talk more about it, I want to show you what these sound like at the most basic level. So I have here two different sample bases and two different synth bass. Simply put, I just brought them in, and then ShiftCliq Control G allows me to group them so you can see I have both sampled bases in this group and both Synth bases in this group. Ableton, if you buy their guitar and bass pack. So if I go down over to PACs here, so if I just type bass over here in the search, you'll see if I scroll down a little bit, we get over to this guitar and bass category or pack, and it's going to have mostly guitar sounds, but it does have some bass sounds. And the fretlss base doesn't sound terrible. It's a good starting point if you don't own something like contact or a high level sampler. That being said, the fretlss base ends up sounding something like this. It's passable. So keep in mind that with something like a sampled bass or any sampled instrument, really, what someone is doing is getting an instrumentalist to play every note on their instrument at pretty much every volume, and they're also recording little nuances, like if I play lightly, for example, I don't know if you can hear that. Turn it up a bit if you can't there's this deadened sound of just sort of tapping the string. Also, when I let go of a string. There's a little tiny sound. It's hard to hear, but you can also see that there's parameters down here for this bass. Like pitch? Mm hmm. I'd recommend probably just keeping that at zero. Dead note velocity. If I crank this, listen to what happens when I play lightly. It's intense. So that's the sound that I was making before this very light sound. You can control how loud that little chunk on the string is. Note off volume. This is what I wanted to show you. If I crank this. Listen to what happens when I let go. Hear that? Oh. So these are all the things that they're recording to make a sample sound authentic. They want the basic notes played at different volumes. They want the off sound of letting go of that note. And they also want some little deadened sounds for funkier parts, ghost notes, those sort of things. Now, you might be thinking, why don't they just record every note at, like, one medium volume, and then you can turn it down or turn it up, and then you have quiet and loud versions of that note. Well, think about this. If I play a bass guitar very lightly, it has a very smooth rounded tone. But if I really slam that string, it kind of distorts itself a little bit, and something like that is really going to play into the sound of what is being sampled. So there's quite a bit of work that goes into building these sample libraries. And there's one particular sampler that everyone out here is using, and it is contact. And there is a free version of contact. Feel free to look into contact player. Right now, I'm on Contact seven. Contact eight is out. It's hard to keep up with this stuff sometimes. It just keeps coming out. But this is Contact seven, very similar to contact eight. And this is the Scarbi bass amped. One of my favorite basses because it has some fun sort of crunchy and fat settings that are going to give you a fun rock sound or just a bit of an edgier tone to your bass. So while our Ableton bass sounded like this. Kind of a little bit Seinfeld Dean. It's kind of an old school sound. Contact is gonna sound more like It's the legato that gets me. Those little details of the slides and hearing the fret sounds, so much detail goes into these sample bags to give you this really professional sound. So, in short, that's kind of what a sampled bass is going to be. You're gonna play it on your keyboard, but you are playing the sounds of a real player. And if they don't sort of capture all the little nuances like dead sounds or the sound of releasing off of a string, it's not going to sound convincing. So you want to go with a pretty good sample library. Unless you're going for something that's intentionally going to sound kind of retro then that's on you. But that is, in short, what a sample base is. And a synthase is basically going to create these low sounds similar in that it's in the bass territory of a bass guitar, but it's going to use synthesized sounds to do it. In other words, it's going to use these electrical oscillators to take something like a sine wave or a square wave, repeat it very, very quickly so that it creates a buzz. And when we hear that buzz, that is essentially us hearing the synthesis. So even something simple like this sound, you can hear it sounds a lot more retro, a lot more electronic. That is in the realm of a very simpled synth bass. So if I open up something like serum, you'll hear under the, for example, base presets, just even the first presets I go to sound much more modern. Tons of sub information, a really good processed sound in that there's quite a bit of different effects that create the complexity of what we're hearing within this synthesized sound. So you get the more real sounding base, which is sampled, you get the more electronic sounding base, which is Syth. What you want to ask yourself is what style are you creating and which type of base might work best. Now, track to track, you might even want to jump around a little bit, and you may even want to consider trying to layer sounds. That all the sub information is done using a synth base, but the upper information is using a sample base. So you have this sort of hyper realistic sounding sample base with all the low frequencies that we would expect to get from a synthesizer. So make sure that you're fitting the genre based on what you choose and make sure that you're fitting the groove. You want to listen to a few different things within the bass parts. Are they simple or are they busy? Are they chugging along on one note ACDC style, or are they moving around quite a bit like a walking bass from a jazz base pattern? The bass notes sliding between one another using something like portamento or glide, which we'll talk about later, or are they very staccato, short and separated, creating a little bit more of a chaotic, almost arpeggiated sounding bass part. Also, is the bass part straight? One and two and three, and four end or swung, one and two, and three and four. These are all super important things to start to note, but it all starts with active listening, taking the influence that you have, listening very deeply and making sure that you're taking notes of what is it that I'm trying to recreate to achieve that sound? Now, sometimes that might be listening to a very complex synth base, and you don't know how to recreate the sound. First of all, I would say, explore experiment. Even if you get close and make it your own, that is arguably even better because you're getting close to your influence, but doing your own thing with that sound. There's also tutorials online for creating very specific base sounds from very specific artists, and there's even newer AI synths like Syn Plant two that you can feed a sound into. It's going to analyze the sound in terms of how it was sound designed, and it's going to spit out many variations of that sound. You preview different ones until you find one that's close, and then you can start with that, and then you can even change the synthesis from that point. What I'm saying is you want to make sure you're listening deeply and try to have a game plan to be able to recreate either the sound design for that particular base sound or just generally the groove that's associated with that particular bass. So I wanted to show you the basics of what a sampled base is, what a synth base is, and get you to really start listening carefully to your influences so that you can create bass parts that are similar. Whether you're using a synth base or a sampled base, you want to have a good understanding of what it is you prefer, and then from there, slowly hone in your sound. So that's it for this class. In the next class, we're going to talk about why we use octaves and fifths so much in base parts. I'll see you there. 4. Octaves and Fifths: Do. Up next, let's talk about why we use fifths and octaves so much within bass parts from the safety of how they sound to the ease of playability, to the math that just makes them make sense. Let's break things down a bit. Now, first, it's important to mention that when a sound plays, there's a vibration going through the air that is oscillating up and down at different frequencies. In other words, is it a slow up and down? Is it a fast oscillation, a fast up and this is what we know as frequency, and it's represented in hertz. In other words, cycles per second. In 1 second, is there one up and down, one oscillation, or is there 1,000? One oscillation would be one t, 1,000 oscillations in a second would be one kilohert. So this is how we talk about the frequency spectrum, whether we are considering how to tune a piano or working with an EQ and visually understanding where certain frequency landmarks are, it's important to understand what frequency is all about. Now, as you may or may not know, the bass guitar is not notoriously known for playing chords. If you start to play chords on any instrument, as you move lower and lower and lower, there's more conflict between the notes. Think of the notes like beams of light. As you get lower, the beams of light get thicker. Now, we don't want to overlap the beams of light, but we also don't want huge gaps between them necessarily when we're playing chords. So if you think about a chord that's really, really high up on the piano, it's very thin and brittle. It's like three lasers with lots of separation between them. It just doesn't quite feel connected in terms of the light. Down low on the piano, you play a chord. It sounds grumbly. All these fat laser beams are overlapping one another. But you play towards the middle of the piano, and you get these beams of light that are medium thick and sort of end up just sort of touching the edge of one another, that's sort of the sweet spot of harmony. But again, when we move down quite low, everything is sort of overlapping each other. The sounds are bullying one another and it's just too much happening in one space. So generally, we don't really play chords on base. But when we think about how the math of frequencies work, if I'm playing, for example, this note here, which is an A, and then I play an A one octave higher, what I have is double the frequency. Let's say this A is a 440, 440 cycles per second. If I go down one octave to an A below it, now I have A 220. It is half the frequency of 440. And if I go up an octave, it works the same. Now I have A, which is the note, 880, 880 hertz. So part of the reason octaves are forgiving on base is that you could play two As together. They're separated enough that the sounds aren't overlapped and conflicting, and the math just works out really well. But outside of the math of things, quite honestly, you're not usually playing an octa harmonically, like at the same time on bass. It's just a safe, no choice. If the chord is a C major chord, playing a C is safe. So playing any other C is going to be generally safe. Now, I say safe in terms of the note will sound decent, but you also have to consider the role of the bass. Should I be playing a C and then a C three octaves higher on the bass? Well, no, now I'm encroaching into the territory of singers and other instrumentalists. But generally, if you're staying in that low range of the bass, it's fine to play octaves. What's cool is once you get the idea of here's my note A and here's an A one octave higher, now you can just play around with rhythms using those two notes. It's just two notes, but as soon as you introduce that second note, now you can start to introduce a lot more in terms of groove and different patterns. So I would say, if a chord progression goes D minor, G minor A, try playing a lot of Ds, Gs and As by themselves, and then try Ds as octaves, Gs as octaves and As as octaves. That might sound something like this. So I'm down here on this D, maybe just a there's the G up to the A. Just like a kind of chunky rock sort of part where we just have, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, just on one note. But if I get playing octaves, now I have sounds like. Now I'm starting to create much more groove, even just by introducing that second note. So the math works really well. They're simple in terms of playing patterns. But there's one other note that's really important. And again, you notice that when we play one note, there's only so much we can do with the rhythm. I mean, a real basis on a real instrument with all the nuance they can introduce, we'll tell you there's plenty I can do with one note. But when we're working on keys and when we're creating these parts, generally, it's nice to have more than one note available per chord. So on a D minor chord, I don't want to be forced just to play only one D. But this octave, yes, it's important. There's another note, though, that we can introduce. And again, this opens up the stylistic patterns we can play considerably. And that is the fifth whatever key you're in, whatever scale you're playing within. The fifth note, so if we're in D minor DEF GA, one, two, three, four, five, that A is a very important note because not only is it going to be part of that D minor chord, but it also sort of bridges this octave. D to D is a very wide distance. What if we had some note that can kind of help us bridge between those Ds? Well, in this case, the fifth A is a super solid choice. Now, in terms of frequency, you'll notice when I play two Ds together. I almost just sounds like one note. It just sounds like a thicker version of D. Here's the low D. Here's the high D. Here's both. Just sounds like a thick version of it. If I now play D and then the Fifth A and then play them together, you'll see it still sounds pretty decent. Here's D. Here's A. Here they are together. There's a little bit of dissonant sort of wobble, but for the most part, it sounds pretty consonant. It sounds pretty fine. If I bring it up an octave, it sounds even better. So it's going to sound a bit thicker than an octave because the notes are closer together. And in terms of the math, basically, what you're getting is a two to three ratio. While this bottom D oscillates two times, this A in the same duration of time will oscillate three times. Mathematically, it sounds kind of problematic, but it's really not. Two and three actually work pretty well mathematically. They both are divisible by six. We work with twos a lot in music and threes a lot just in terms of time signatures. But what's interesting is if you slow down the vibration of the two and three enough actually hear a rhythm. And this experiment was done inverse by Jacob Collier, where he was playing some sort of rhythm. Let's say, I'm slapping it on my chest. It's a two against three rhythm. And if you speed it up enough, eventually, you hear this interval of a fifth. So this rhythm I can't go fast enough because I'm human, but if you do it really, really, really quickly, then you start to hear that fifth form. So even from the basic rhythm, the beats that create those notes, it's very fundamental. So our fifth D to A, in this case, and our octave D to D, super important intervals to be working with on bass. I've played with enough basis to know that even beginner basis will often start with this stuff because it's safe. What chords are you playing on guitar? A minor, E minor? Okay, I'll play A and E. Now I'm a bit more adventurous. Let's try octaves, more A's and more E's. And now that fifth can help me bridge between those areas. And it's also a safe note that you're going to find within the chord. Now, when I say you'll find it within the chord, I'm talking about basic chords. If the chord is called minor seven flat five or something like that. Now they've changed that fifth, so you have to be careful. I don't want to dive too deep into the theory at this point because everything can start to intersect really quick. But the idea is on most major chords, minor chords, dominant seventh chords, major seventh and minor seventh chords, root fifth octave, very safe choices. Now that we have this fifth available, let's see how that might change the bass part a little bit. It might sound something like this. Now, there's all these notes dancing all over the place, but we're just kind of stuck in these patterns of root fifth octave, root fifth octave, root fifth octave, and noodling around in those positions, generally playing the low root first, and then experimenting with these upper notes rhythmically. The other thing to mention is that a major chord or a minor chord has a root, a third, and a fifth. We're playing the root and the fifth, but we're not really playing the third. Part of the reason, as I mentioned, is it's too close to the root and fifth that if you do end up playing notes together, it just sounds muddy, but also bass parts generally dance around tonality a little bit. In other words, the guitar and the piano and the singer are going to help outline the majorness or the minorness of the song, arguably, more than the bassist. So the root fifth octave isn't actually touching the part of the chord that makes it sound major or the part of the chord that makes it sound minor. We're kind of dancing around neutral territory and just really creating a solid foundation. If major or minor sort of colors the sound, we want to think of that like a house. The bass is like the foundation for your house. How fancy do you want the foundation of your house to be? You don't need it to be fancy. Really, you just need it to be foundational and really supportive, and that is generally the role of a bassist. Now, as bass players progress in their careers, they may have more of a role that is upfront. Someone like Victor Wooten is not always laying down the most simple bass parts. He can play melodies, he can play chords. But that is generally not the role of the bass, and you have to be very nuanced in the way you approach something like that. And just to be clear, I talked about the math of an octave being double the frequency and a fifth being like a two to three ratio, a triton which is one note lower than the fifth. So up six semitones from your first note has a ratio of 1.414 to one. Mathematically, that's a nightmare. And you can hear this sound. Sounds kind of like a nightmare. So the math between notes and how fast they vibrate and how those vibrations interact with each other is very important. And although base isn't always playing chords, it still keeps this relationship between notes in mind. Now, what I'm not saying is that a basis can never play the third of a chord. I think as a starting point, we want to have roots and then octaves and then fifths as a solid foundation, and then we can start to play around a little bit more with introducing thirds. In our next class, we are going to be talking about outlining thirds within our base parts. So let's jump over add some more notes that we can play around with to help the rest of the band outline the major or the minor of the song. In other words, the tonality. I'll catch you in that next class. 5. Outlining Thirds: Do. So you've got your roots, octaves, and fifths down. What can we add to our base parts? Next, I'm going to recommend that you start to look in to outlining thirds within your movement in your base parts. Less to dive in, talk about what thirds are and how you can put them within your baselines. So when we have a chord like, for example, C, E and G. This would be a root, third and fifth of a C major chord. The root is like a tree. It's where things are grounded. It's where things feel like home base. The fifth is the fifth note of the scale that it comes from, and the third is the third note of the scale that it comes from. Now, we're not always going to be playing the first chord from a scale. Like in a C major scale, I'm not always going to be playing a C major chord. So when I say that it's the third and fifth of a scale, more so what I mean to say is whatever note you're playing within that scale, let's say we're in C major and I'm playing the fourth note, you're going to go two notes from there and another two notes from there. So you find a point, you go up to the third note from that point or up to the fifth note from that point within whatever key you're playing within. In short, up a skip, up a skip. That creates a chord. Bottom note is root, up a skip is the third, up another skip is the fifth. So that third is going to outline the tonality. If I just play a root in a fifth, sounds fine. Sounds powerful. We have that sort of chuggy metal power chord sort of sound. But when I add the third, you'll hear down low, first of all, it sounds really bad. So you have to watch out when you're adding thirds. Don't do this harmonically when you're playing low on the instrument. In other words, don't play it together with these other notes. But for now, I'll bring it up in octave. So here's the fifth. And when I add the third, you can hear it sounds major now. Or the fifth when I add a flat three or the third from a minor version of the scale, now I have a minor sound. Now, as a bassist, you have a lot of control. If the piano players playing a C major chord and you play a C, you're really creating a solid foundation below it. If you play the fifth, you're leaving a little bit of sort of open endedness. It's not quite unresolved, but it's not fully resolved if I play the third. It's kind of creating a little bit of an extra brightness to that major sound, or maybe if it's minor. It's leaning a little bit more into that minor tonality. So this would be called slash chords. I'm playing a C major chord, and then the base is playing an E, so it's C E is how we notate the chord. But generally, I would say for now, like, 90% of the time, you're going to want to be focused on the root of whatever the chord is. If the chord is D minor, focus on playing the D. Now, like I said, you could stay on the third F and sort of change the sound of the rest of the band. But in this class, what I wanted to get at a little bit more is just the idea of moving through that third. So we talked about the root, D and the fifth. A, what if I moved up through the F? Okay, I could even come back to that F on the way back down to the D. Now I have this sort of sound. Sort of like a sca bassline or even sort of sort of a walking bass within a jazz part. But you can hear now the difference is that I'm able to access some of the tonality within my bass part. In other words, it sounds minor. What I'm playing doesn't just sound foundational with roots and fists, but that third really helps outline that minor or major sound. Now, if you're a blues bassist, you may already know this. This is very important to have this sort of that first part of the sound is root, third, fifth, straightaway, and then usually up top, a six and maybe even a flat seven, this classic sort of bassline. But even just the first three notes. Sort of gives you that 50s do op sort of sound, and it can also lend itself towards the blues. So some styles do use more of their thirds within the baseline. But again, it comes down to active listening. Listen to the bass parts that you want to recreate, try to figure them out on the piano or even just do a little bit of side research based on that genre and see, are they using roots and fifths? Most likely, how much are they using thirds, though? That's going to be important to watch out for. Again, as a friendly reminder, do not play thirds down low. Like the idea of D to F down low, it just sounds messy. You could take the F up one octave, so you have D up to F. And that's a pretty common sound to sort of separate the notes, almost like an open voicing on the piano, but really just sort of separating the notes of the chord, so you still have the root on the bottom, but the fifth or the third might be played up one octave. So there it is, not our longest class, but just sort of adding this idea of the third as its own separate entity to remind you that it's used quite often stylistically within certain genres, and what it's going to do is outline more of the tonality, the major or minor of the chord that's being played. Also, if you want to experiment a little bit harmonic, try playing the third or the fifth underneath the chord that's being played. Your guitarist is playing C major, and instead of playing C, you hold the E, the third, or you hold the G, the fifth. It will change the sound. I wouldn't recommend doing this if you're playing covers, but if you're, for example, composing something with your band and you're looking to play around with things harmonically, then that might be a super solid choice. Now, that being said, if you are covering music and the original basis was using these slash chords, then, of course, feel free to use them. So that's it for this class on Outlining thirds, in the next class, we're going to talk about dia and chromatic passing notes. Now we're really opening up a lot more note choices, and I'm looking forward to telling you what it's all about in that next class. I'll see you there. 6. Diatonic and Chromatic Passing Notes: Drop. Let's get talking about the most important reason for you to know scales as a bassist, as a producer of baselines, diatonic passing notes, and eventually we'll talk about chromatic passing notes. These are super important. Let's dive in. So, first off, what is a passing note? Let's go back to our example of a D minor chord. D, the root, F, the third and A, the fifth. But what about the E and the G that we skipped over, right? We had D skipping the E to F, and then F skipping the G to A. So we're skipping these notes. What if I was to pass through them? D, E on my way to F, G on my way to A. These are passing notes. We're passing through non chord tones to reach the next chord tone. So we can do this ascending. We can do this descending, and in some cases, there might even be like a double passing note. So D, for example, if I go up to F, I've passed through one note. Now I'm going to go up to the fifth passing through one note. But the next D is passing through two notes because a chord, while it's made of all skips, once you add the octave, there's a fourth on the top of that chord. D skips up to F, skips up to A, up a fourth to the next D. So that fourth might require two passing notes. These are called diatonic passing notes because diatonic basically means it's true to a scale. We're passing through an E on my way to F. I'm not passing through an E flat. Because it's not part of my D minor scale. However, there are some times that you might want to play some notes that are not within the scale. And these would be chromatic passing notes. So let's say I have a D minor chord going to a G minor chord within the song that we're playing. I might want to play just notes from my D minor chord two, three, four, but what I could also do is after the third beat, let's consider something. One, two, three, there's my three notes for my D minor chord. My next chord is G. And if I was to from this A, go down to A flat, it pulls me to that G so nicely. A flat is not in my D minor scale, but I have A as my beat three note. And on beat four, I'm doing a chromatic passing tone on my way to that next semitone, which takes me to the root of the next chord. All that is to say, a chromatic passing note is going to pass from one note up a tone or down a tone through the semitone between. It's moving via semitones or to a note that is not within our key. So together, that sounds like this. Very important in jazz walking basslines, right? I have chord tone sounds fine. And then I go to my G chord. But if I play this sort of chromatic passing tone, now it really starts to sound a little twisted and a little bit jazzy. So what I would recommend is that as you're transitioning from one chord to another, if you notice that you have one beat left and you need to fill in the distance of a tone or a whole tone, just use the semitone in between to sort of bridge those two chords together. But this can also work if I'm just vamping on one chord. Let's say there is no G minor chord and I'm just playing D minor for a while. Maybe I could play something like root, which is stable, third, which is stable, fourth, which is stable, sharp four is a chromatic passing tone. To the five. Now notice I'm not sort of playing a note and then using a chromatic passing tone to leap somewhere. It has to connect. The distance that you're trying to fill is a tone. Now, you guys start to fill in lots of chromatic passing tones, but at some point it loses its objectivity of what key am I in, what feels like home base, and what are the notes within my scale. But throwing in the odd one can be very effective. Here's a little experiment that you can play around with. Take a C major scale and just try it out on the keys. All white notes, C to C. Now, play it again one more time, but fill the first note to the second note and then work up the rest of the scale. Now take the second note to the third note. So D fills to E with a chromatic passing tone, and then up the rest of the scale. Now, four to five, five to six and six to seven. So if you haven't caught on what I'm talking about, when I say four to five, I mean, the fourth note of the scale has a chromatic passing note up to the fifth. So you would try this with all the tones within the scale. C to D is a tone, try filling it. D to E is a tone, try filling it. Same with F to G, G to A and A to B. Once you hear all these options, there might be some that you like the sound of more. But what you'll start to notice is the reason why after we do this fill, I'm just going up the rest of the usual scale is because you want to make sure the ratio of chromatic passing tones to diatonic notes, notes within the key is not too overshadowed. You don't want tons of these chromatic passing tones. They should be like a little spice that you add to your basslines. So consider diatonic passing tones to be a little bit more safe and chromatic passing tones to be a little bit more adventurous and colorful. So in terms of safe basslines to colorful adventurous basslines, we have playing roots only roots with octaves, roots, octaves and fifths, roots, octaves, fifths and thirds, then adding diatonic passing tones, then adding chromatic passing tones. Once you get to the chromatic passing tones, you've graduated from having basslines that are all centered around one note at a time to having every single note available. So now that we've really opened up the note choices that you have for your baselines, let's play around a little bit stylistically with long notes and short notes. Playing legato, playing staccato. This makes a huge difference in terms of the groove of your basslines. So let's get talking about the longs and shorts. I'll see you in that next class. 7. Shorts and Longs: Let's get talking about the shorts and the longs within your baselines. How does it sound if I play more short notes? And how does it sound, if I play more long notes? Whether you're playing a synth part or a sample bass part, you're going to get very similar results. So let's get talking about it, and let's jump in. One of the best ways for us to demonstrate this is just to come up with a baseline. I'm going to play something relatively simple, and we're going to start with longer notes. Now, I want to mention straight out of the gate, the summary of this class is going to be long notes are better for balllads and short notes are better for funkier parts. But the best baselines are often going to fuse the two together. So there's longs and shorts within that baseline. What I'm not saying is that baselines with long notes have to be played only in balllads and that baselines with short notes have to be only played in funkier tracks. But it just tends to kind of work out that way. But at the end of the day, most style a fusion of relaxed baselines and groovy bass lines. And so, again, that combination of the longs and shorts and mastering that is very important. So let's try a baseline. I'm going to come up with something simple. We're at 125 beats per minute. I don't know what I'm gonna play, but let's just come up with something. Here we go. Let's try it out. I, one, two, three, four. So there's our baseline. Let's give it a listen, and I'm just going to quantize it a little bit. Mm. Okay, so straightaway, you can hear that this is not a ballod baseline. More so what I was talking about is really long held notes like this. This sort of idea. But we can even create quite a bit of a groove just by making sure that the density of our notes within four beats is quite dense. So you'll notice one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, ten notes in eight beats. I mean, this is kind of a bit of a sweet spot where it's not too nody but it's not too boring. So our baseline is kind of boilerplate to get started. Listen to what happens when I select these and make the notes much shorter. I'm going to do this with each note. Some of them were longer than others, so I have to make sure that I'm going back and shortening some of these other ones. Now it sounds like this. Okay, not exactly super funky. What I could maybe consider doing is, like, doubling up each note. Getting a little bit funkier. You could try triples. At some point, it's overkill, but the idea is you can hear that this baseline is just screaming to have some long notes within it. Let's start with a long note, so maybe a couple long notes. Kind of medium long for these ones. I mean, this bassline does want a few more longer notes than shorter, but you can see that adding a couple of these short notes do D D dum these little sort of staccato accents, staccato being the short notes, does help add a little bit more groove or what we might call ghost notes, these notes that are almost non existent. And again, keep in mind that the sample bass, if I play it quite lightly, I get these sort of deadened strings. So you could take these short notes. Lower down the velocity. If we're looking down here, I'm taking this velocity, and I'm either raising or lowering it so you can see. I just adds a little bit of groove to that baseline. Now, this was kind of a boilerplate baseline to get started. As an example, if I'm just playing long notes, it could be something like Kind of boring, but the rest of the band has lots of room to play around over top of that simple bassline. At the same time, I could do something kind of like and play around and get really noty but at the same time, be much more short with those notes. That gets us a little bit closer to sort of groovy or funky sort of baseline. So really, this is what I was talking about in that first class where you're listening to some baselines and asking, What does the groove feel like? And how can I recreate that sound and that groove on my sampled or synth bass part? It's not uncommon for me to come up with a bass part and then play around with the length of notes. Just to see if I can connect certain parts of the bassline a little bit more with longer notes or create some separation groove by shortening some of those notes. Now, keep in mind the terms for smooth and connected notes would be legato, and the short and detached notes would be staccato. There's a fun feature in Ableton that I want to show you. If I play a bassline in Ableton with mostly short notes, something like Something like that, just really kind of simple. What I can do is select everything. I'm going to do this with a Control A for Select All, and you'll notice on the left side here, and this is under the pitch and Time category. I'll just kind of resize things so you can see that a little bit better. But you'll see this is the pitch and T category here. And what I'm doing is I'm looking down here at the legato button. When I hit this, as long as these are all selected, watch what happens. Boom, everything is now connected. So if we play it again, So if you're not good at playing connected, but you're pretty good at poking around, you can try this legato function after, and it'll smooth everything out for you. On top of that, a quick control you will let me quantize so that everything's a little bit more in time. Kind of sounds like sweet dreams at this point, but I think my quantization should be set to 16th notes and not eighth notes. If we just loop that for a second. Now let's take a couple of notes and shorten them. Mmm. Getting a little bit groovier, right? So this is what I'm talking about about playing around with shortening some notes. You could start with everything nice and legato and just pull some of these notes a little bit shorter. Some of these lower notes that were already quite short, like around this length, I happen to know that these are going to work really well as ghost notes because these low notes tend to want to hold, and if they're not holding for very long, you might as well make them quite short, and quite often that's going to give you a nice sort of little ghost note or sort of accent within your baseline. There's nothing wrong with holding these out. I'm just saying these could be a good place to start in terms of what to shorten. Also, when a note repeats, try taking the first one and shortening it, try taking the second one and shortening it. Usually, one long, one short can be a good formula to play around with for those repeated notes. The big point here is that every style is going to treat these long notes and short notes differently. Are you playing in three, four, six, eight, 44? Is your song fast? Is your song slow? This is all going to make a big difference. But ultimately, I would say, listen to what your band is playing. If they're playing something frantic and all over the place, then it might be a good idea for you to lay down more of a foundational simple bassline. But if they're playing something quite simple, it might leave a little bit more room for you to explore some extra notes. You don't want to go too far in the extremes. If they're playing a ballad, you don't want to be playing metal fusion over top. If they're playing metal fusion, you don't want to just hold a single note the whole time. Generally, you're going to have to find that sweet spot for what works, but just keep in mind, it's tough when everyone in a band is trying to play something complex. It can be boring when everyone in a band is trying to play something simple. So coming up with a bass part that complements what the other musicians or other instruments are doing is very important. In our next class, we're going to be talking about the function of different wave forms. In other words, the function of different types of osciators within a Syth. Let's nerd out a little bit with some basics of synthesis. I'll see you in that next class. 8. Function and Waveforms: The all right, let's get talking about the function of different waveforms within a Synth base. When I say waveforms, I'm talking about sine waves, square waves, and sawtooth waves primarily within the realm of subtractive synthesis, which is what I'm going to show you. And at the same time, we want to consider that these waveforms are oscillating over and over and over. So these can also be referred to as oscillators. It's all kind of the same thing. Let's jump in and get talking about these different types of waveforms. So what you're going to do is go over to your instruments section in Ableton, and we're going to be looking for something called analog as our Syth. You're going to take that and drag that into some open midi channel or even just in this case, d into any bottom area where it says drop files and devices here. So we have this instance of analog, and we want to be looking at this top line here and this bottom line here as being basically the same thing. You can see we have amp one amp two, filter one, filter two, Oscillator one, oscillator two. For now, we're going to turn off Oscillator two because the idea here is that you can have two types of sounds and fuse them together in different ways. For now, I just want to show you the basics of these waveforms so you can understand how they could function within your baselines. So we're going to turn off Oscillator two. So the only yellow oscillator button that we have is this one here, Oscillator one. Now, straight at the gate, this shape is what we are talking about the different types of wave forms. So we have sine wave sine being Latin for without. There is no harmonics on this wave. It is very pure. We have a sawtooth wave. It looks like literally if you zoom into a saw, a little tooth on that saw, and a square wave aptly named, as you can see, everything is squared off and working in these very angular sort of ways. There's also noise here. We're not too concerned with that, but it is worth noting that noise is available within this synth, mostly used for layering. So this is the point where you want to make sure you're using either headphones or a decent set of speakers. We're going to be listening to a sine wave, and these are very pure sounds, especially when they're very low. They flux speakers very well. There's no distortion to the sound. They work really well as a foundation below bass parts. So if we listen, it's quite low, and I can go even lower if you listen down here. That's down into that like 30 hertz sort of range. You might not be able to hear this at all, but again, if you have good headphones or a big set of speakers, you'll be able to hear that. I'm going to move up from this D one note at a time. Let's see when you can hear it. My guess is by now, you should be able to hear, right? Just listen to how smooth this sound is. That's a pretty great foundational sound. So one thing you can do is come up with a baseline on a sample base, for example, so one, two, three, four. Something simple. If I now take this and duplicate it down to the synth that I have, if I just listen to it by itself, I'm going to take that sine wave and bring all those notes, so Control A to select, shift down. They're now down one octave. That's gonna be really hard to hear. But again, if you have good headphones or good speakers, you'll be able to hear it. But what we're going to do is take spectrum within our audio effects and pull that onto our main or sort of master bus, and we're just going to watch to see what happens as I play only the sine wave. So we're very much in that sub territory, especially on these lower notes. We're getting up to, like, low base around 80 hertz. But everything below that, like 60 hertz, we're down into that sub territory where you feel the base more than you hear it. So if we take a look now at the sampled base that we have, let's take a look at this territory. The lowest notes are around that 70 80 hertz, but it's mostly up around one or 200 hertz. So if I hold control, I can now play both at the same time. Let's take a look. That sine wave is giving us tons of sub foundation below this sampled base part. Now, I would recommend if you, for example, go over to audio effects, and you're going to just sort of pull down into Eight. So on your sampled base, you're going to take everything from about 100 hertz down and filter that out. And then on the Synth base, I'm going to do the opposite. I only want to hear things below this 100 hertz, which is kind of already the case, but we're just being extra cautious this way. Here's the Synth base by itself. Here's the sampled. Thinned out just a little bit, but together, we have a really solid foundation for that base by using the sine wave. So all that is to say, the sine wave is very smooth and works really well as a sub foundation below a bass part, it's quite often used as a sort of layer to these bass parts. Next up, we're going to check out the sawtooth, my personal favorite. This one's going to be a little bit more gritty, and I really like distorting this sound. I'm going to show you it in its basic form, and then we'll try distorting it a bit. So again, really quickly, if I go back to the sine wave and play a low note, you'll see there's no harmonics, like, maybe a tiny bit, but this is very much the foundational note. If I go over to sawtooth, look at all these harmonics. We're hearing way, way, way up into the frequency spectrum. So the distortion has more to sort of grab onto and distort in terms of those upper frequencies. Now, what I'm playing with right now, if I play a key quickly, Mmm. It sort of fades out. I want it just to be when I hit the key, it's on. When I let go, it's off. So what I have right now is if I play a key quickly, you'll see it has a tail. It sort of releases over time. If I go in this particular synth over to this section here, where the level is represented, I'm going to pull this sustain up, pull the release in, so we have a nice squared off shape. I'll also do the same for the filter section. This isn't a huge deep dive into subtractive synthesis, but if you just follow that step, check it out. Mm hmm. Now it's very much on and off. I said, It sounds great with some distortion. Let's first try something like Raw, which emulates the Rat distortion pedal. It's actually the only guitar pedal that I have. It's fantastic. This was influenced by listening to a lot of at attat and their bassist uses this quite a bit. I love their bassist sound. Would recommend looking into this. But that being said, UAD has their own version called Rah. You can see the name is very similar. It's a nod to this very simple distortion pedal. If I now play a bit of a bass part, You can actually pull up quite a bit of these higher frequencies as you crank up this distortion. So you wouldn't want to overdo it in the filter. Allows you to open up quite a bit of the his or treat it more like a bass part by subduing those high frequencies with the filter. Sounds quite nice. But we can go even more extreme with something like trash. And I use this quite a bit. This is actually one of those distortion petals where I'm going to have to pull down the volume a bit because some of these presets are quite loud. So to show you, if I take something like let's go on the aggressive category like box in. I really like that one. Let's go over to a sine wave and listen to how it's different through the distortion. It's cool. It has a little bit of a grit, but not much. It's still very rounded and a very sort of unaffected sound. So the distortion doesn't have those high frequencies to play around with, and that's where we're going to hear most of our distortion. So working with this saw tune now we have tons of those upper harmonics to play around with. Now, something to mention is that once I've distorted the saw tune if I was to, for example, go onto my main master channel here and just listen to low frequencies, again, big speakers headphones, make sure you're listening on a device where you can hear this, check it out. If I take that distortion and really crank it, I'm actually going to start to sort of fold in these low frequencies. In other words, the base frequencies get quite affected. Did you hear that difference there? And some of this squaring off of these really low sub frequencies is going to make it so your baseline doesn't translate as well on big club systems or big car systems, for example. So I would recommend doing that same trick that we did before. Have a sine wave as a nice, smooth, safe low end to your base part and then sweep out the low end on this more distorted part, similar to what we did on the sampled base so that it can be the more textural part of the baseline. And the low sounds, for example, that sine wave is going to be the more solid foundation. So really quickly, what that looks like is I'll duplicate this Ableton base part. I'm going to have this as the sine wave version, cutting out all the high frequencies. And then this one is going to be the opposite. It is going to cut out the low frequencies. It is the sawtooth. And when I play it together, now I have my sine wave down low. And my sawtooth wave up above, something worth mentioning, and I forgot to do this is on the sine wave, take the octave down one, generally. This is going to put it more down in the sub territory. So now when I play, you can see these really low, like 20, 30, 40 het frequencies. When I didn't have this turned on, if we look back again, everything is like 80 sir, like a 68 hertz and above on that low D. So again, our sine wave, the purpose of it is to help us beef up that low end of the sub. So bringing it down one octave, it's going to give you that really wide sort of range of bass frequencies. We have our sub supported down below, and then up above, we have this distorted sound. And what's cool is if you put an EQ before the distortion, any of these bumps are going to affect the sort of tone or texture of the distortion. So when I say bumps, I'm talking about these parametric EQ bumps, check this out. Right around there, we get a little bit of growl, which sounds quite nice. And then you can sort of level out things from there. So the sine wave, the sub, and the upper distorted part of the base are leveled with one another. Anyway, before I dive too much deeper down that wormhole, again, the sawtooth wave is going to give you a very sort of gritty sound, especially once it's distorted. It does have a bit of a video gamy sound by itself. But going to the next type of osciator or wave form, which is the square wave, check this one out. We're in, like, battle toed Supermio sort of territory. We're like, back in the NES SNES days. This is the really old school sounding, video gamey synth base. If I bring it down in octave, you hear. Just very video gamey, very gritty. And what you're hearing is this sort of on off, on off. And that's creating these little flickers or almost sort of fuzziness to that oscillation sound. This is the idea of the square wave is on off on off. And if you take on off and oscillate that fast enough, you get this gritty sound. If I take it down even more, that's a really low octave. You can hear every one of those squares turning on and off. But as I move up higher, it just sounds like a solid tone. So that's something that's really cool about the square wave, and you can also hear it a little bit within saw waves. But as you move lower, you'll hear more separation of those on and off. So for now, what I would say is use it by itself if you're doing something like chip tune or old video game music. But if you're trying to use it in a more modern setting, try that same sine wave down below, so you have a nice solid foundation. Notice I did this with sample base, sawtooth, and square waves. I really like making sure that my sine wave is down in that subterritory. So my subwoofer is hitting something very smooth and I have a lot of sort of foundation happening below my mix. That'll give you all that extra low end, but video games didn't have all that extra low end back in the day. So if you're really trying to create a retrosund just stick with the square wave. Now, again, if I go back into, for example, the attack, decay, sustain release, and play around with a shape that looks similar to what we started with, this also works really well for that old video gamy sound, sort of plunking around on notes. So play around with a bunch of the settings, but now you have a good idea of the function of a sine wave, a sawtooth wave, and a square wave. Of course, we've talked about using the sine wave to layer down below. It's also quite fun sometimes to layer a little bit of noise up above. So while I have this square wave, I can add a little bit of that white noise. Admittedly, it's more than a little bit. So you'd want to take down the volume here over by this oscillator button. Let's take it down maybe 6 decibels ish, maybe a bit more. And now we filled out a little bit more of the higher frequencies. So you have your basic oscillator. It's nice to pair a sine wave down below for a little bit of foundation, but it's also a good idea to take another oscillator like a sawtooth wave and bring it up one octave, just using this little octave button over here, you would take this and bring it up one octave. So you can do this again if you want, bring it up a second octave, but you can see how we have our foundational sort of base part. Then do we want to add sub information generally with a sine wave, or do we want to add some noise or a higher oscillator up top? Another thing I'll mention is that this particular Syth analog, which comes natively in Ableton, doesn't have triangle waves. Triangle waves work kind of similar to sine waves. They're a little bit thicker in terms of their harmonic structure. So what I would say is if you have access to triangle waves, feel free to put those down in the subterritory, as well, too. But generally, for now, sub base information, I would stick with sine and triangle. For base information, you have pretty much all the oscillators or waveforms as options. And then for upper information, again, they're all available. I generally wouldn't use a sine wave because it's so piercing and you can also use some noise uptop. We talked about quite a bit there. In summary, sine wave smooth, sounds good, low. Sawtooth crunchy, sounds good, distorted. Square wave, quite retro sounds really good for chip tune and old video game music. And if you have access to a triangle wave, try it low as well. It'll be a little bit thicker than a sine wave, and it might work really well for the foundation of your bass parts. So that's it for this class talking about the function of the different waveforms within Synth base. In this class, we touched upon ADSR, which is this stuff over here that I was playing around with. In our next class, we're going to dive deeper into those ADSR settings, attack, decay, sustain, and release. Let's get talking about them. I'll see you in that next. 9. ADSR Settings: The Alright, let's get talking about ADSR, attack, decay, sustain, and release. In subtractive synthesis and other types of synthesis, it's really important to make sure that you have an understanding of these basic envelope functions. Envelope being like, imagine you have a particular buzz, and you want to wrap it up in a way that it needs to be played. So maybe it fades in slowly and then cascades out slowly. Maybe the sound starts instantly, holds full volume, and then cuts out instantly. This is what you're wrapping your little electrical buzzes or oscillators within. It's your envelope, it's ADSR. Let's get talking about it. So we're back here with analog again, and here's the sound that we have. So the main section that we're going to be looking at right now is this amplitude section, and we're going to be playing around with the envelope of the level. In other words, the attack, decay, sustain release is only going to be affecting volume. So this little sort of diagram over here, this is our ADSR. Now you can see it written out attack, decay, sustain, sustain time, and then release. We're mostly just concerned right now with the attack, decay, sustain, and release. So while these four numbers here are important, we can do things very visually over here. Start off by doing this within this level section, and then you can also change things within the frequency section just beside it. So what I'll do first is I'll get the frequency section to be very squared off for now, so we're hearing only the effect of the level or the amplitude and its envelope. First off, attack. If I play a note, right now, you can see the attack is very abrupt. So I start to trigger the sound at zero milliseconds, and within five milliseconds, we are hearing the sound. Then it's going to decay over 227 milliseconds down to a particular volume that will hold until I let go of the key, and then that is the release time. How long does it take the sound to come down to zero after I let go of the key? So right now our attack is instant, but I could slow it down by pulling out the attack. I could go even more. And now we're swelling into the sound. Mm. So that can be great for softer sort of bass parts. But generally with base, we like to have a little bit of attack. So we'll keep that attack there. What you'll notice is that there's this sort of punch to the sound, and then the volume comes down a little bit. This is a bit tougher to notice, but see if you can notice the sort of impact of the sound. It's like, boom, bow. It's very subtle. But what you'll notice is that if I pull this way down, now we can really hear the difference of that impact and then the volume of what is holding. So this is your decay and sustain working together. How long is that initial bump? If it's long, you have a long decay time. If it's short, you have a short decay time. And how loud is the sound when it holds. That will be determined by the sustained volume. So if I pull this way to the right and keep it low, that decay is taking forever to get quiet. And then at some point, it's going to hold at this lower volume. If I pull it in really close to the attack time, now, I have a very quick blip of a sound for my decay somewhere in between is probably better, and then you can take your sustain to determine what is the volume of the held portion of this envelope. But again, when I let go, listen. Here's me letting go. Listen to how long that release is. It's taking quite some time to return back to zero or no volume. So quite often, like, this is a full 3 seconds. Quite often, I'll have my release set as short as possible. I want to make sure that when I let go, the sound stops with it. It's okay to have a little bit of a release. It feels quite natural, but I would say, generally, you're not going to want to go with a huge release. Unless the point is, for some reason, like, let's say, I have to play a bass note and then go over and play some other keys of some sort, I can have that note sustaining and sort of slowly decaying over time, based on the fact that I just flicked a key again, that's me just touching a key. Now I can play another part. So for something like live looping, it might be a good idea to have a really long release, in this case, 15 seconds, quite long. But generally, a pretty short release we're in that sort of vicinity of five milliseconds to, like, 300 400 milliseconds is probably a good place to start off. Now, if we go over to another synth, for example, something modern like serum, we're going to notice that there's an envelope section, envelope one, two, and three. Now, in this particular preset, of this base sound. As I look around, what you'll notice is that this cutoff filter is moving quite a bit. And if you look as I scroll over, you'll see Envelope two and macro one. That is the stuff that is affecting this knob. Envelope two, this shape is affecting how this filter works. And I can also do this with volume. So let's say the filter is turned off. There's our sound. Let's drag envelope two over to our level knob. Level is down all the way, but this range of this blue knob here is how much the envelope is going to affect this particular knob. So you'll see it vastly different as I pull it up and down. So this is what was pulled onto the cutoff before. I'm going to just get rid of. We're going to remove modulator two. And as I play around with this, you'll see it's the same thing. As I pull to the right, we can affect how things are swelling in in terms of this filter and how it's being used. All right, so big attack, slow attack. Here's our decay and our sustain. So if I want to have it holding, I have that sustain up, but if I want it more like a pluck, I would have the sustain down. So you can see, even with this base sound, the slow attack still works quite well. Fast attack? Quite punchy. Slow attack could work really well as, like, a drum and bass sort of baseline. So the point here is in that most synthesizers, you're going to be able to use an envelope, attack, decay, sustain, release to affect multiple things. I would say start off with understanding how it affects volume and then understanding that it can do the same thing for a filter. Is the volume gradually getting louder or is it suddenly getting louder? That is your attack. Does the sound gradually get muffled like this? Or does it happen really quickly? That would be a slow or fast attack on your filter. But again, you can apply these settings to other things, as well, too, like detuning, panning, and so much more. Finally, let's go through a few different serum presets and play around with the envelopes to see just how much you can take a basic preset and make it your own pretty quickly with playing around with these envelope settings. So here's our next sound. And straightaway, you can see quite a bit is happening. There's movement here, there's movement here, there's movement here here and here. But again, as I scroll over the cut off of our filter, we'll see envelope two is one of the things affecting this filter. So let's go to Envelope two and play around with this envelope a bit. So we keep the same tonal texture, but we're really changing the shape of how that sound develops. Our next sound is pretty basic. It's a basic square wave base. There's really not a whole lot of modulation. Again, you'll see there is a subtle roll off for this release time. If it's absolutely sudden, it sounds a bit more artificial, too long, and you're getting quite a bit of overlap between notes potentially. So let's take down that decay. And again, we get more of a plucked sort of sound. Let's move to the next one. So now we're starting with a plucked sound. And. Let's try getting it to sustain and hold. A very different type of sound, right? In terms of function, if you have this in a song, there's lots of space for other instruments. There's quite a bit of space between these sounds. However, if you start to pull this up. Now, it's much more all encompassing and taking up more space within your mix. For our last one, let's try playing around with the envelope on a couple of other settings. Here's our initial sound. Again, quite plucky. I'm going to take off the delay for now in this effects section. And we're gonna play around with the envelope just a little bit. Again, sustaining, quick and plucky. Let's go somewhere in between. Let's take this envelope and move it over to detune. So we're starting very detuned, and then pulling into a more pure sound. That's giving a little bit more grit right off the start. Now, if we play around with some different types of waveforms and I move the wave table position, you'll see that this knob changes the sound over time. It looks really cool. In this view. All you have to do is click this image, and you'll see that right now it's not moving, but if I pull envelope two onto the wave table position, and we can have it scroll through different waveforms or different parts of that waveform alteration. So right around here there's quite a bit of textural difference in that little section of the waveform. So again, you can really start to experiment and explore as to where you apply your envelopes. And in something like serum, you can have a particular envelope shape, a second envelope shape, and a third and apply those different shapes to different knobs. This is how when you're going through preset packs, you're hearing all these really detailed sounds. It's basically a bunch of these shapes, which right now is envelopes, but there's also step sequencing and LFOs, which we haven't talked about out of the context of this class, but these shapes that are altering these different knobs that affect different parameters. If I turn this knob and it makes the sound crunchier, what are some shapes that I can apply to that knob to play around with how that crunch is played around with rhythmically or maybe over time? So what I'm really getting at here is when you find some base presets that you like, feel free to play around with the attack, decay, sustain, release. You can make it more or less plucky. You can make it more or less aggressive, and it really gives you a lot of opportunity to explore throwing these envelopes onto almost random knobs and just seeing what results you get so that eventually when you have a sound you like, you've made it yourself, you've just started with a preset to help you out. So for now, those are the basics of attack, decay, sustain, release, your ADSR settings. Attack, how fast does the sound get introduced? Decay, does it pull down a little bit after that initial punch? Sustain. Does it hold after it's come down? And if so, at what volume? Release when I release the key, how long does it take for the sound to die out? Play around with those settings on volume and filters to start and then from there, try exploring, applying them to other knobs, whether it's detuning, wave table position, or whatever other sound altering knobs you can access. So that's it for this class. In our next class, we're going to talk about applying groove to your base through the groove pool. I'll see you there. 10. Adding Groove: Top. Alright, let's get talking about adding grooves to your baseline. Using Ableton'sGroove pool, let's jump in. So for this video, I'm actually going to be blocking where the groove pool is with my video. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to extend this section up a bit. Yes, it crams this top section, but that's okay. It allows you to see the groove pool. You can see here it says groove name, and there's gonna be some qualities to the groove that you select. Off the start, you really won't need to do much adjusting with that unless you're really going for a very specific groove. But there are so many in Ableton that you're going to be able to find something I'm pretty certain that you like straight out the gate. So what is a groove? A groove is basically applying swing, but it can do some other things as well, too. So if I have a high hat pattern that goes one and two, and three and four end, I can use a groove algorithm, so it goes one and two, and three and four end. But it can be more complex than that. Maybe it's one and two, and three and four and one, where it's kind of stuttered a little bit, a little bit of that sort of Jdilla drunk drumbeat sort of sound, it depends on what groove you select. But off the start, I'm going to recommend that you go with the MPC grooves within the swing category. It's going to give you some basic swing to get started. And what I've done is I've created a drum beat here, and we're going to apply some swing to it. Now, you'll notice that over here, there's this little groove section, and right now it's set to none because there's no grooves available. Up on the left side here. Now, this is Ableton 12, but I know as far back as Ableton ten, for example, what you would do is right click in the groove pool area and select Add Groove or something like that, and then it's going to populate a bunch of grooves you can select from. But now there's this grooves category up over this way. So we're going to select grooves, and you have to ask yourself, am I playing on an eighth no grid or a 16th no grid? Is it teta, Tata. What ENa two e anda, three and a four anda, or is it tet Tet teta, one and two and three, and four end. I've created a beat here that has the second example, the eighth notes for the high hats. So we're going to I'm going to see what I can get away with here with a little bit more screen space. Within this swing MPC 3,000 eighths, you'll see different numbers. This is basically think about like a percentage of how much it's swinging. So 71 quite swung, 57, a bit more subtle. So if I take, for example, 57, I can drag that down into the groove pool area here and you'll see that it does populate over in this area here. So you can preview them by clicking them. And when you find one you like, you can either drag it down into the groove sort of pool area, which is down around this area, or we can drag it straight down into grooves down here. So I could drag it down here. Now, let's say I take 64, for example, a second swing algorithm, and I bring it down here. What you'll notice is they're both populated up here and they're both populated down here within this list. Let's listen to 57 and the slightly more affected 64 on the drums, and then we'll talk about how to transfer this over to the base. Now, before I show you the swing, here it is straight. A pretty classic sort of rock beat with some fun chromo sounds. We have 57 as our lighter swing algorithm. We can hear the swing already, and here's 64. So this is pretty significant once you hit the 64, but let's keep it selected for now just so everything is a bit exaggerated and easy to hear. Now, let's say I come up with a baseline and I'm going to go ahead and take off any swing from the drums initially. Let's say everything is played straight for now. Mmm. So I'm going to go ahead and record a baseline that is straight. It would sound something like this. Bend Something pretty simple. So maybe we just do half the length of the drums. It's just the same thing repeated. Anyway, if I was to listen back to it, I'm gonna quantize it first, so control A for select A in this midi area, Control U for quantize. So we're going to check out this groove first with no swing on the drums or the base. Depend. Now, let's go ahead and go up to the drums, apply the 64 swing, and we're going to go down to the base and apply the same thing. And let's listen to it now. Did Everything is swinging because I've applied it to the drums and to the bass. So I've seen some students that apply swing to drums, but then they don't consider it on other instruments. It's very important, and I want to make sure if you're applying swing to some instruments, the band would be swinging together, so all the instruments should have some instances of the swing if they're playing on that eighth note grid. Now, another example that's really cool here is we could go ahead and bring in some sort of a drum loop. So let's go into, like, disco house. Let's just see what we find here. Sounds good to me. There's a little bit of swing baked into this, so we're going to just drag this down here and we're going to right click, we're going to go extract grooves. This is really powerful within Ableton. We're going to go ahead and select extract Grooves. And what it's doing is it's reading this drum loop information to see what is the swing being applied at this stage of things, Like what sort of swing does the loop have? And what you'll notice is that over on the left side here, we have that swing that is now available. So I'm going to mute the drums. When I select the base, I should be clear, I'm going to mute these top drums, the midi drums, but we're going to keep the midi loop playing and the bass part playing. But now the bass part, I'm going to apply the swing from this loop so that the drums have a similar swing algorithm to the loop, and they should lock in quite well. Let's listen to the base without any swing algorithm with these swung looped drums, and then we'll apply the algorithm to hear them together. So here we go. Go do. Sounds right. Let's apply that swing and see how it sounds. Good, and me, it sounds more locked in. It might be like a placebo effect. Let's see if we can find a drum loop that has some very evident swing, a little bit more swing and try doing the same process one more time. So let's take this one here. So let's do that again, where we pull in our drum loop. We're going to right click and extract Groove. You'll notice on this right side here, there is no shortcut for extract grooves. Womp womp, but you're not going to use it a whole ton. You just need to extract the one groove and then apply it to other instruments. Let's let it do its thing. Okay, so we're going back to the bass, and we're going to again apply a straight version of the swing algorithm. In other words, no swing. Let's listen to it with the beat. Let's listen to it with the swing. It sounds something like this. So I think what I'm noticing here is that we're not really hearing too much. To me, it sounds more locked in, but it could just be placebo. I think it's because the drums are hijack, chick, cha, chick, they're 16th notes. So what we can do is take the bass part. We're going to divide it by two, and we're going to multiply it. So now it's on a 16th note grid. Now we're hearing it, right? So if I go to none, Teca tack ta ta, ta, ta ta ta. If I swing it with that new algorithm So now it's a bit more locked in with the drums. It feels a little wonky on this part here, but you can hear the swing in this front half here. It's pretty easy to hear. And then something happens here. Again, these algorithms are not perfect swing. They are taking little nuances from the beat outside of just basic swing, if there's some little inconsistencies, it's going to pick up on that. But it sounds pretty good. It sounds locked in with the drums. One more time. It sounds like this. Is expensive. So just keep in mind, whether you are taking an Ableton groove and applying it to all your instruments with a bunch of MIDI information, or if you want to take the groove from a waveform like a drum loop, you're able to do that. The last thing I'll mention is you can also take that groove and apply it to another drum loop. Let's say we have something that does not have swing, well, we can now add swing to that loop. What I will caution you with is if there's a loop that has swing, you extract the groove, and there's another loop that has different swing and you apply the swing of the first loop to the second, you're going to get some wonky results. This is really for going from a straight rhythm to swung or swung to straight. Don't work in this sort of swung to swing environment. It's going to get really crazy, trust me. So let's take something like this drum loop here, which is pretty straight ahead. It sounds like this. And we're going to apply some swing to it. Let's take one of the swing algorithms from one of the last loops. Let's try this one here. Now, this is on an eighth note grid. So actually, this swing algorithm is not going to work because the loop that we pulled the swing algorithm from was chick, Jack, chek haka cheek cha, one Eenda two EN, three, EN, four eenda, 16th notes. This is more eighth notes, so we could apply just one of the basic MPC swings. But the same philosophy applies. You can hear we've added some swing to this audio loop. So whether you're swinging loops which are audio or midi information, it's all possible in Ableton, and then you take that and you apply it to whatever your bass part is. You start by playing a simple bass part that is on the grid, and then you apply the swing. Similarly, if you've played a bass part or someone else has played a bass part and there's a particular swing within it, and then you create your drum beat, why not create the drum beat straight ahead just on a straight rhythm and then extract the groove from the bass and then put that over to the drums. Now, let's say I play something like this, and I go, So that's very swung one anda, two anda. I can extract the groove from the MIDI information, or I can flatten it down to audio and then do the same thing where I'm extracting the groove from the audio loop. All this is to say, Ableton has grooves, but you can also pull grooves out of pre existing loops or MIDI. You can then apply it to other loops or MIDI. But again, just be careful that you're not applying a swing algorithm to another sample that's already swung. That's it for this class on the groove pool. I know a lot of what I was showing you was in the context of drums, but the drums are going to supply that groove, and it's going to go over and be reapplied to the base. You can also reverse engineer, as I mentioned, start with a groovy bass part, extract the groove and apply it to a straight drum beat so that the drums have the same groove as the base. Having said that, understanding how to apply the groove to drums and to base, those two together need to lock in. So it's super important that we talked about both. So that's it for this class on adding some groove to your base. In our next class, we're going to about compression. How does one compress a base? How is the parallel compression on bass different than something like parallel compression on drums? We're going to dive in to compressing base in that next class. I'll see you there. 11. Compressing Bass: Drop drop. Alright, let's get talking about base compression. In this class, I'm not going to use Synth or sampled base. I'm going to record a raw base. That's not really what this course is about. Specifically, we are working with sample base and synth base. But what I will tell you is that most Synth bases don't really have too many issues with compression, as well as a lot of sampled bases. They're already sort of pre effected. So I wanted to give you something really raw that we could then compress, just to show you how you can go about this if you have issues with the compression of your base. Now, as a quick overview, compression is this idea that when volume changes happen, times we don't want so much of a volume change and we want to sort of stifle that difference in volume. We want to compress the dynamic range. We want the softs to feel a bit louder, the louds to feel a bit softer. Really, what we're doing is taking the louds and making them softer and then bringing up that whole signal so that, again, louds feel softer and softs feel louder. Compressing base has its own difficulties because to a compressor, these low frequencies have more energy, and they trigger compression so that some of higher end of the base, and some of the stuff that's happening is higher noted content gets over compressed. So we want to make sure that we have a way of either going into our compressor with a fairly balanced signal so that the low frequencies aren't triggering too much compression, or we use something called parallel compression. Let's talk about both and let's jump in. Now, what I've noticed from my interface is that when I record in the base, this mic isn't working, and this is a relatively complex setup. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to record a base part. I won't be speaking during that time so that Ableton can record in the base. And then we'll get talking about how to compress that base. Okay, so this is a pretty great bass part for us to work with because it is not perfect in terms of volume, consistency throughout. And I tried to explore some different ranges on the bass going through all four strings. Here is my pretty haphazard little bass part. It sounds like this. Mm. So the higher notes I accidentally didn't play as loud. I'm not a seasoned bassist. I can play passable bass parts for the sake of composition, but I'm not practicing two, 4 hours a day, that kind of idea. So it's great that I don't have the perfect part, because what if this is what we got from the musicians at the end of the day, from our sampler, from our Synth? Maybe there's some subtle differences in volume as you move higher, whatever it might be, you can even see visually this wants to be compressed. There's more energy happening here, less energy happening here, and it wasn't intentional. So how do we smooth things out? First of all, we could just sort of slap some sort of compressor onto the bass part. So let's say I just use Ableton's compressor. There are certain ones like the 11 76 and LA two A, where they're kind of go to compressors for bass and for vocals and this sort of stuff. We're just using Ableton's stock plug ins as much as possible. So let's give a listen. We're taking a look at the bass line. We're going to give it a loop. Mm. So you can see if I bring the threshold down to here, it's going to compress those first few notes, and it's not going to touch the rest. And this is an important thing to bring up in that quite often cereal compression, not the type of cereal you eat, but SERIAL is pretty important. Having one compressor sort of tame some of the rogue peaks and then a second compressor to smooth things out. So what that might look like is these settings seem great to me already, just like a pretty quick attack setting at one millisecond release you can play around with a bit. I'm just going to keep it at 30, which is relatively quick. And I kind of prefer this view over here. So we're just going to pull this down. Mm hm. And we can see the gain reduction is doing much more on those first few notes. Now, what I'm going to do with this second compressor is I'm going to create a new audio track. I'm going to set the input to resampling. And what that's going to allow is that if I solo this bass part and arm this base part here, we're going to be able to record onto a new track and see the differences in compression that we're playing around with. First, if I was to set this second compressor to about ten milliseconds attack and auto release, you're going to see things get a little bit spikier. Take a look at this as we go through. Let's record coming down. I mean, I'd probably want to record this in Mono, but the point still stands. Do you see all these little spikes that are happening in comparison? Let's pull this out a little bit. That is our ten millisecond attack time, giving a little bit more punch. But then look at all the control. Like, if you look at this tail versus this tail, it's like, maybe 15% different. Look at this tail versus this tail. It's like, 80% different. So from there, you can choose to smooth things out. If you don't want it to be so punchy with these big transients, you can pull down the attack time and take a look at how this changes it. H. Things are looking pretty smooth. Let's go zero attack and zero attack and see how that sounds. So even then we're going to see a little bit of this attack on these notes. We want some attack. And part of that, I think, has to do with the knee, the fact that the compressor is slowly adding this gain reduction over time. I'm not going to go so deep into, like, what a knee is and all the different elements of a compressor. Right now, we're just talking about the basics, mostly ratio, attack and release. Notice how ratio was set to four to one. That's really common for bass and for vocals. I tend to not touch it too much, but you can sometimes take it up to ten to one if you want a little bit more control over those rogue peaks, like I think this first one could work well as a ten to one ratio. But for the smooth butteriness that we're going for on the second compressor, I would keep it at four to one. So we're going to keep this at one millisecond, and then this one here, we're going to set to ten milliseconds. We're going back for that punchier sort of sound. It sounds something like this. Okay. And now, from here, things are easy to control because you can see everything looks like, if I got rid of these little peaks, you would see everything looks really smoothed out. You could even go one step further, and you could bring in something like a clipper. And in this case, I'm going to use, I don't know, I probably want to use standard clip or something a little less CPU intensive, and bring down our clip, so we're taking off some of those little peaks. You can see the red is the reduction. And we're not clipping the, the basi part of the sound, just the initial attack. You don't want to clip base frequencies, but when it's these little sort of transients that are happening, you can clip these and take a look at how much control we have now in this final signal. Goodbye, spikes. We just have a little bit of extra transient off the start, which for base is pretty common. If we're listening, Those higher notes really don't sound nearly as quiet in comparison to those first few low notes as they did before. So that would be like serial compression. Tame some rogue peaks. Then you can also choose to create how much punch you want on the second one. You're sort of shaping the tone. And then if there's too much punch, but it sounds good, but the wave is, like, just way too spiky, just clip off some of that and then you're fine. Now, the way I would usually compress bass is through parallel compression. And this is different than parallel compression on drums. Parallel compression on drums, you have your big spiky original wave form, and then you squash it on a parallel track. So you duplicate it or you send it to a bus or however you want to work. You duplicate it to some extent, and you really squash all the transient. So it's just a blob. And then you take that blob and you slowly raise up the level. So now what's happening is you have the spiky version with lots of attack, the blob version that's super compressed, and you find some sort of middle ground between the two. It brings out the tail, the long elongated part of that snare drum, for example. It can make the high hats sound nice and compressed. It just glues together the drums. So you have spiky version, non spiky version, blend the two. With base, our main concern is that these low frequencies are going to trigger more compression than the high frequencies. So the amount of compression is really changing based on the range they're playing in the base. So why don't I isolate the more base frequencies of the base and then affect the higher frequencies separately? That's how we're going to be doing our parallel compression. So starting fresh again, we're going to go over to our audioffects. We're going to pull in a compressor. And I'm going to do a Control G, which creates a little group for these. I'm going to open up this list, which is down in this area here, and that allows me to right click and create a second chain. So this is our regular compressed base, and then up over here, we have another version of our regular compressed base. Now, here's where the Secret Sauce happens. What we're going to do is we're going to bring in an EQ, EQ eight, in this case, and we're going to pull to this top one. Let's say low base, and let's call this one. High base. So our low base part, before I even go into the compressor, I want to make sure that the only thing being compressed is low frequencies. So I'm going to set this to, let's say, around 170. You could go up to around 300 or maybe as low as 100. 170 tends to be a bit of a sweet spot. If I take the high base over here and mute it and then keep the low base on, here's what we're hearing. And I'm going to turn off the compression so you're hearing just the low frequencies, no compression. Here's how it sounds. Okay, so that's the signal that we're running into the compressor. Again, with these low frequencies, you want to have a relatively quick attack, and quite often, I'll set auto release or just sort of feel it out a little bit and take a look at how this threshold is recovering. So when you're taking a look at these sort of little visuals here, you can listen and watch and see kind of what works for you. But I like setting it to auto for this low frequency compression, so we'll set the release to auto. Attack is at one. Ratio at four, again, works quite well. It's not too heavy handed, but it's not going to just barely tickle the compression. There's going to be some noticeable compression. So again, I'm going to flip views. That's my preference here. So, as usual, like before, we're seeing more compression on these lower pitches, but that's kind of what we want right now as this isolated version so that these three are more compressed. They're a little bit quieter. These are not even compressed at all, and then very mild compression on these two that will already start to take the dynamics and bring it slightly closer together. Like we did before, we could just take a look with the low frequencies only what's happening behind the scenes. So you can see we have a little bit of a weaker signal on these top notes still, but we are still only part of the way through the process. But again, looking at this, compared to this, we're already much closer. This was also not a particularly great bass take. I'm not a fantastic bass player. So this is why recording a good player is also important. But, again, we're trying to sort of save the mix. I could automate this low end information so that it's a bit louder or I could even compress it a second time. There's some different options available really depends on your workflow. But you can see we're starting to get close. So we're back up into this area here where we have our low end being compressed, again, you might want to put a second compressor to sort of level things out a bit more. But for now, I'm going to compress the high frequencies separately. Let's listen to those. We need to again bring in an EQ, and this time set it so that everything above 170 is what we're hearing. So now let's listen just to the high end information. Mm hm has some nice grit. You can see most of the notes are pretty level up around this point. Some notes are a bit quieter. Let's pull down our threshold so we're affecting some of those higher notes. I want a little bit more of that punch to bite through. You might want around five, ten, 15 milliseconds, even upwards of 20 or 30 depending on how much bite you want. I'm going to go for a little bit of bite. We're going to go five milliseconds. And again, we're just going to set the release to Auto, but you can do some math to figure out your release time. You can do some feel to figure out your release time. It is ultimately one of the toughest things to explain how to do exactly. So if you're stuck, if you're confused, or for the sake of ease in this video, just set it to Auto. So, sounds like this. I'm going to bring the ratio down to three. I don't want to be too heavy handed on this compression, but I'll bring the threshold down a little bit more. Let's bring that attack up a bit. Let's try 15. Mm. That has a little bit more bite. It's sounding quite nice. But the other thing is, too, usually, I will use saturation on the top end to really let those upper harmonics sort of sing out. Think of saturation as, like, light distortion and light compression fused together. In this case, we're going to saturate to slightly gel things together and then run it into our compressor. We have the warm tape setting, pull it up a bit. Okay, so we have a relatively balanced signal if we bring in the low end again. So the issue here is that the low notes, these ones here, still sound a little bit too low. What I would probably do to remedy this, if I was really stuck, I would just automate some volume changes here, but I'd prefer not to. So we're going to play around with a second compressor, possibly on both of these different low and high parts, but I'm going to start with just the high parts, and let's see how that sounds. So over to just the high base, again, we are just selecting the speaker for the high base only let's put in another compressor. For now, I'm just going to keep the settings the same, although I might bring the attack down to about five just so that there's a little bit more control. And actually, let's bring the ratio up to four. This one needs to be a little bit more controlled. We're trying to make sure that we have things closer to the same sort of size or volume. We're going to have a little bit more of those transient peaks. Now, I just want to glue things down a little bit more. So again, let's give it a listen. Our threshold is pretty low. We're grabbing a little bit of everything here, which is good. The volume has been calm. Promise, we're going to pull that back up. And let's just take a look at how our new signal looks. There's a whole lot of control. And on this note here, I did sort of pop into the string a little bit more. So we're keeping some dynamics in check. But if you look at the tails of each of these notes, they're now very close. From here, you could add a bit of dynamic EQ to smooth things out a little bit more. But you can see we are in much better territory. Bring up your gain, so you're seeing, like, a nice, healthy signal. This is how I would recommend compressing base if it needs compression. A lot of sampled base, a lot of synth bases don't need compression because there's already compression applied. So take a look if you're in serum, for example, make sure that you're taking a look at the effects section. If I go to any random preset right now, so we'll pull open serum. Let's say I go to forward. I don't know the sound off hand. If I go to effects, look at that. There's a compressor. If I go to the next one, there's no effects at all. Interesting. Next one. You look, there's a compressor, right? So you can see there's compression on a lot of these presets already. And these sampled bases, sometimes when someone's in the studio playing a bass to be sampled, it's running through a whole rig of guitar pedals or amps or whatever it might be that's already applying compression. So use your ears and make sure you're asking yourself, subjectively, are some notes poking out way too much? If they are, compression is a great place to start, but balance that with your EQ. The other thing I wanted to mention is that an equalizer is meant to do just that to equalize the tonal balance or the frequency spectrum. So take a listen to the base track. If it feels muddy, if it feels like there's a lot of thump happening on the low end, deal with those small issues with EQ or dynamic EQ before running into your compressor. The same way we put saturation before compression to smooth things out a little bit more. You want to make sure your compressor is working with a healthy signal so that it can work the best for you to give you an even healthier signal on the other side. So there's lots of different use cases of popping and slapping base versus chunky metal distorted base, but I wanted to show you the main difference here is that when you want to compress base and keep the low end nice and smooth and buttery and the top end with a bit more tonal control, try this parallel compression technique, especially on distorted base. Think of this. When you start to distort base more and more and more, you actually lose a little bit of the low end content. So what a lot of engineers will do is they will record the base two ways, direct in smooth, regular unaffected clean base and a second with the amp. And then you would run your compression relatively similar. Sweep out the low end of the distorted version and sweep out any high end of the clean version. Now, you have almost like that sine wave we were talking about before through synthesis, a nice smooth, rounded tone for the low end, and you can distort that upper end as much as you want without affecting that low end signal. So for me, around 170 is that sweet spot crossover point for the smooth low end and isolated top end that you can now balance how you want tonal. If your base signal going in is already relatively balanced in terms of EQ, you might be able to get away with using basic compression or maybe serial compression, one or two compressors back to back on the overall signal, but I would highly recommend work with this parallel compression technique because for me, I use it every time. Like, there's no reason for me to go and do the other way because I have more control and I understand how to utilize that control through this technique. So that's it on base compression. In the next class, we're going to talk about base ifs. I'll see you there. 12. Bass Riffs: To, Kentucky. Next up, let's get talking about bass ifs. What is a bass if and how can you create some tasty bass riffs? Let's talk about it. Let's jump in. So a bass if is very similar to an ostinato. And the word if is a little bit loose. But if we think of rock and roll and the guitar parts that are often created, those would be examples of ifs. There may be four beats to 16 beats long. They're often repeated fairly verbatim, so they might not change at all, or they might change a little bit, especially in terms of the first note or the lowest note on bass riffs. So as an example of that, if I have a bass if that's I might end up doing something like Just little variations as I move notes around. But I don't even need to. In fact, even if the chords move, I don't necessarily need to change my base if. I've created a small keyboard part that sounds like this. And let's play a baseline that does not change chords. G minor nine, E flat major seven and C minor seven. Those are the three chords, but I'm not worried about G E flat C being my roots. I'm just going to play one base if throughout. So something like this. One, two, three, four. So it's just a really simple part. No moving with the cords, creating this sort of static foundation. So whether you're moving those bottom notes or not, you have that as an option. And once you have a base rif, for example, I know GE flat C are my main roots for my chords. So I could take this bottom note of my base if, move it to an E flat, and then here, move this to a C. It's subtly different, but now it sounds soloed like this. Okay. And you might even want to change the last note a little bit. Like, you have some options. It doesn't have to be an exact repeat. Play around with what sounds right. Here it is with the last note changed to a C, since my last chord is a C minor. With the rest of the instruments, it sounds like this. So that's the basic idea. A base if doesn't have to be complex. They can be relatively short at about four beats. They can be longer at about 16 beats. But there's one scale that I think you're going to want to tap into that's going to really help you with your base ifs, and that is the minor blues scale or the minor pentatonic scale. If we take a minor scale, take a look at my little mini keyboard just below, ABCDEF GA. There's a basic minor scale for us. If we get rid of the second note, so A is going to skip straight to C. We're going to move up to D, we're going to move up to E. We're going to skip the sixth note F, so up to G, up to A. This is A minor pentatonic. Five individual notes before we reach our octave. And if we put this D sharp in between the fourth and the fifth note, then I get my minor blues scale. But for the sake of bass rifts, I'd say, just focus on the minor pentatonic. This new note that we've added to the blues scale kind of wants to have a specific function of pulling to neighbor notes, and it's used, I'd say more often melodically, but feel free to play around with it. I'm going to recommend that you play around with the minor pentatonic. If you do bring one of those two eliminated notes, the second and the sixth back in, I would say bring in the second. Second or the ninth is a really fun sound to play around with. Its a little bit more jazzy, a little bit more soulful, a little bit more colorful, and it's a great addition to bring back in once you've sort of got really comfortable with your minor pentatonic. So if I take this chord progression and bump it up two notes, so it's in A minor, we're going to create one new bass if using that A minor pentatonic scale. Let's take a listen. Sounds like this. One, two, three, four. I was only using notes from that minor pentatonic. And you'll notice quite often, I have, like an A going up to an A, and I will use that seventh note, known as the flat seven quite often to pull up to that note. If you're from Tam and Paula, you might choose that ninth we talked about. This sort of idea. So you don't always have to go straight to that root when you're moving up the octave. But again, what we have now, let's quantize, sounds like this. Mm hm. And lastly, why don't we add a little bit of groove to the bassline now that it's been quantized, as well as this drum part. So if I was to go over to groove one more time, let's bring in an MPC swing so we're on eighth notes. We're going to be looking for a swing MPC eighth, which is up higher. 64 works like it did before. We're going to apply it to this. We can apply it to the keys. There's really not much happening with the keys, so we're not going to hear it, I don't think, anyway. And we're going to pull over this, as well, too. Do do, ti, do, do, da. Dude D I think this overlap here needs to be consolidated. Now it sounds like this. So that extra note was a little bit of a nuisance, but we got rid of that and basically have a duplicated version throughout. Again, this is going from it was G to E flat, so now it's A to F, using some relative picture. And then we'd be down to D for this third sort of chord. The last thing that I will mention is that this swing is too much. We would probably want to go with something lighter. So what you can actually do is take something like 57. Pull it over 64, and it will replace any of those 60 fours with 57. So that way, you don't have to do this on each instrument. Just replace it straight in the groove pool by overlapping that particular part. So if visually, you're not seeing what's happening, I'm talking about over here, just taking one of these and dragging it straight onto this old groove to replace it. So now with the new groove, it sounds like this. All right, so whether you want to play the groove or whether you want to play it straight and keep it straight or whether you want to play it straight and then apply a groove, these are all very viable options. So play around with that minor pentatonic scale. Feel free to leave the base riff unchanged, even as the chords are changing. Try it out, see if it sounds good. If it needs to be changed, you don't have to transpose the whole base if and play it up higher on the bass or on the keys. You can just try changing the sort of downbeat notes. One, two, three, four, one. Every time you hit that beat one, feel free to move the first note, so it's the root of whatever chord is being played at that time. So that's it for this class on Base Rifs. Really, it's all about exploring, experimenting, and having some fun. You don't have to use the scale that I recommended, but I would say, try to start with it. It's a pretty forgiving scale, and that's it for this class. Next up, a more simple concept. We're going to talk about disco octaves on the base. I'll see you there. 13. Disco Octaves: All right, let's get talking about disco octaves on the bass. This is a simple concept, a simple class. I'm going to give you one extra little bonus thing for creating some funky bass parts. Let's jump in. Alright, so we're going to pick up where we left off with this drumbeat and these three keyboard chords, and we're going to add a little bit of a disco octave bass part. Disco octaves in their most simple form are just octaves moving back and forth. This sort of G up to G, down to G up to G. But if you double each one, it sounds a little more disco wee. Check it out. It's not just for disco. I've heard the RedHot Chili Peppers bassist Flea do this sort of bassline in their funk rock that they do. But it's a really great starting point. If you're trying to go for something disco or disco influenced, let's check it out with the other part that we had from before. Now, I should mention I'm gonna take off the swing from the drums, but it ends up sounding something like this. So you can see, as the chords were moving, I just kept the same octaves going, but I was changing the notes as the chords changed. A F D. You can quantize this. You can apply groove like we have in the past. I think quantizing and keeping the rhythm straight works quite well in disco. Disco is not generally a very swung genre, even though it is very groovy. But quantized, it sounds like this. That's it. Those are your disco octaves. But the number of times that these will get you out of a jam if you're stuck on bass lines, it's a really universal sort of bass part that's always going to give you a little bit of groove, a little bit of motion. It's going to outline the harmony, and it's a safe, solid backup plan. Now, I said I was also going to give a little bonus tip on how to create some funky bass lines, and it does relate to the disco octaves. In particular, that first little dodo, those first two notes within the line, but then leaving lots of space. In funk music, there's a technique called Hock. And what a hocket is is I play a couple notes, and then the sax plays a couple notes, and then the guitar plays a couple of notes, and everything together ends up sort of feeling like an overall melody, ostinato, riff, whatever you want to call it. Sort of like dub step. Same idea. Woohoo d dj do did. Woo. And then that repeats. But eventually, you can find yourself saying, Okay, that's actually quite catchy now that I know how all the pieces fit together. So playing a couple notes right off the bat, then leaving some space and playing around particularly in that, again, minor pentatonic scale, you end up getting something that sounds like this. Mm hmm. So, again, look at how much space there is off the start there. I didn't know what I was gonna play. It's not a perfect bass line, but doo doo. Do do do. Do, do, do do. Mm hmm. So to give an example, like, you're leaving room for other instruments. So let's say it's something like, one, two, three, four. Mm hmm. So you can see, I have this little keyboard part. Maybe those are horn shots or something like that. But you can see it starts to pull everything together. We have this Dodot tons of space. And then you can kind of keep with these short notes if you want, but quite usually, what you'll hear is a more elongated bass part Dodoo. Pretty do dy d do. But maybe some extra little short shots towards the end. That's another fun little thing you can try right at the end is these little doubles. I'm just gonna duplicate what I had here. Believe it would be here. And here we get something like. Mm. Mm hm. But you can see, it's really funky, and it comes from this sort of initial portion of those disco octaves with lots of space, incorporating a little bit of a bass riff or longer notes, and then some more of those little du notes. So if you're a bass player, make sure you get really comfortable with these disco octaves, and you can throw those into your funky parts as well, too. On keys when I'm playing sampled or synth face, I'm literally just going, Do do do do do do do do do. So just tap on your table. Get used to that feeling, and you're ready to play disco octaves. They're very simple, very forgiving. So that's it for this class on disco Octaves on the base and an extra fun little funky sort of bass part that you can try out. At the end of the day, that technique is all about less is more. Leaves some space, but take influence from a few other different types of base techniques. So that's it for this class. And the next one, we're going to talk about slash chords. I've touched on them in one of the previous classes, but we're going to give a bit more of a real use case for these slash chords. Let's get talking about those, and I'll catch you in the next class. 14. Slash Chords: Alright, let's get talking about slash chords. What I'm talking about is when your guitarist or pianist is playing a chord, you don't always have to play the root. So if your guitarist is playing G minor, sure, G is a safe, no choice. But the notes of a G minor chord, G, B flat, and D, the B flat and D are other solid options, and I'd recommend you give them a try. They're called slash chords because the way they're notated would be G minor B flat or G minor D. Whatever note you've put in that base part, that is what comes after the slash. So G minor is your chord, D is the foundational base note. This gets rid of some of the stability but adds a bit of intrigue to compensate. Let's get talking about it. Let's jump in. So we're continuing with the same bass part and the same keyboard chords as before. Let's start off with playing the roots of each chord as a simple base part. Here we go. It might sound something like this in three, four. Throwing a little bit of those sort of doubles at the end from that disco base influenced section. Nice. So we have a basic bass part to get started with here. I'm outlining the chords pretty well where there's a solid A to start, a solid F here, and a couple of Ds here. But what if on the F chord, which are the notes F, A and C, what if I played As? What if I went to this A here, and this A here? Now it's like I'm playing A and just holding that A into the second chord. Let's listen to how that changes the overall part. M in fact, the D minor chord also has A's. So this is an opportunity to sort of drone A as our main note while the chords dance around. Here's with all of the main sort of outlined notes being A's. Let's check it out. And this works. It's feeling like there's enough tension that it wants to sort of evolve a little bit later on, but it's a fine starting point. F major as a chord also has Cs, and those Cs might work really well to take us to those Ds right after. Maybe I'll raise these up. So you can see this is also pretty functional. So this would be A minor, F, C, and D minor, C because we put C in the base part. But lsten to what happens if I don't start on the root for the first chord. It's recommended that you do because it gives some stability to the baseline in this sort of harmonic shift that does mess with stability a bit. In other words, the back half, the stuff that we altered over here, that messes with the sort of groundedness or stability of the baseline a bit. So let's at least have this first part feel grounded. A minor has a C in it. Let's put C in the base. Doesn't sound great. Maybe the E might sound a little better, but it's still going to sound pretty unsettled. Check it out. So generally, you want to make sure that you have that root right on that downbeat, right on beat one, but on the back half of progressions, try to explore and experiment with playing other notes that are within the chord that are not the root. C major chord is CE G, so most bassist will play a C, but if they want to experiment, they could play E or G. Now for the record, you're not bound to the three notes of a chord or in some cases, the four notes of the chord. A good example would be, like when we're playing a four chord in C major, for example. So C major's fourth chord is F major. CDE F, we get an F major chord. It's pretty common for the basis to play a G, and this is called an LA five chord. So the G is playing over this F major chord. You might even think of it the other way where G is the main note, and the harmony is getting a little creative over the G. But whatever which way you want to flip it, the point still stands. F major has no G in it at all, but with a G in the base and that F major chord, things can sound fine. As an example, I've recreated the Wurlitzer part. Don't read this. It says Syth. It's really an electric keyboard. Same idea. If we listen to it, the chords sound like this. We would say this is a one, 64 chord progression, starting on C, which is the one, down to A minor, which is the six, down to F, which is the four. But on the four, we're actually going to play G in the base, which is the five. Let's check it out. It sounds like this. My main notes are CA, and then G instead of F, two, three, four. So there's some tension there towards the end, this. But it still sounds okay. We're in a moment of tension that's going to resolve back to the one. As long as you take these moments of tension and go to where the audience might expect a bit of relief from that tension, you're going to be able to get away with quite a bit. So the point here was to show you that you don't have to play one of the three notes from your chord. The root will give you stability. The third will outline tonality, make it sound a little bit more major or minor, arguably the five is going to float around a little bit more, and you can play around with other notes, but I would just say play around with notes from the key. If you're just picking random notes, you're going to get some really random results, but you can play around with other notes from that key or scale, whatever you want to call it. So again, this was sort of a follow up class from a concept that we talked about earlier in the course, but I wanted to give you some examples of how these notes sound when placed with some chords so you can really see how these slash chords work out. For our next class, we're going to talk about pitch bending and portamento sometimes referred to as glide, so I'll see you in that next class. 15. Pitch Bends, Portamento, MPE: Alright, let's get talking about how you can pitch bend between the notes within your baseline. You can bend to extreme ranges or keep things more subtle, and there's lots of different ways that we can approach this. So we're going to talk about pitch bending, portamento glide and MPE. Let's jump in. So first, I wanted to talk about two ways that you can bend between pitches as part of your playing style on the keys. And that would be using the pitch bend wheel on the left side of your keyboard or using portamento slash glide. Let's start off with the pitch bend wheel. It tends to be what most people are more familiar with. So the first thing I want to mention is that bending pitch on a sampled base does not sound quite as good as bending on a synth. And part of the reason is with synths, we can bend slow, we can bend fast, we can have large or small bends, and it's all within what we're used to hearing on that type of bass. But on a real bass guitar, a bending of the string happens quite quickly, and it's not a very wide range. It's not bending up one octave, for example. So if I have a bass line and I'm wanting to take a note like A and bend it, if I go really slow, I'm not saying bass can't bend slow, but it doesn't really lend to the bass line very well. If I play something like where I'm bending slightly and slowly, it doesn't sound great, but if I go that That quick up and down can sound quite good. Now, I also know that I'm bending two semitones, which is the default for a lot of synths and samplers regarding that pitch bend wheel range. So I'm asking myself, what note within my scale has a note, a tone above it or a tone below it? And those will be the notes that I pitch bend up to or down to. You can extend this range as well, too. Most samplers it's a little bit harder to find, but on something like serum, you'll be able to see in that bottom left corner, there is a up range and a down range for that pitch bend wheel. If I bring it up, let's say, seven semitones, which is a fifth or down five semitones, which is a fourth, now I would have something that sounds like this. D up a fifth. Four down a fourth. Alright, so I'm not saying that these aren't necessarily the intervals you would want when you're doing these pitch bends, but you have a lot of control. And what's really cool is you didn't used to be able to do this. So if I want to at some point in a baseline, bend up a tone, but then later bend up a fourth, for example, I can change that through automation. What that might look like as a very basic example is something like this. And I'm going to solo our lane here. Let's say it's one, two, three, four. Okay, so it's bending up twice, and it's the same amount both times. But I could take the bend bend up parameters and make it so it's up, for example, an octave the second time, 12 semitotes. So you can change this throughout. And this is great if you're trying to connect notes into each other or really make sure that you're bending exact amounts, but changing what that exact amount is. MPE, I think, does this better, but we're not quite there yet. So you can see you can automate the range of the pitch bend wheel. Also, if you double click into the MIDI information and go into envelope, Bottom left corner here, you're going to go to MIDI control. And then if pitch bend isn't already selected, you would go up. It is up at the very top. You can also pencil in your pitch bend information. So I could have something like this note straight out the gate, bends all the way to the top of this range. The second time, it bends all the way down. Now we have So, not great for baselines in particular, but if you want to pencil things in and you're not comfortable playing keys, you can obviously pencil some notes in this view here, and then you can bend between those notes however you see fit. Now, in terms of playing bends, what you can do in serum. And I also like in silence. I like it even more, but we'll talk about that in a moment. In serum, there's this bottom right section over here, and it has Porta which is portamento. And there's some different things that you can play for now, what I would say is the most important are the mono, legato, and the Always and portamento. Always is you're making sure that you're always gliding between notes. You can see how many milliseconds it takes to glide, let's say around 100 milliseconds. Mono is you can only ever play one note at a time. So if I don't have this turned on, I can play up to poly eight. So polyphonic up to eight notes at a time. This sort of sound, you can hear the glide if I go much more extreme. It can have some pretty cool sounds in applications, but for the most part for baselines, you'll want to be monophonic. You don't want these notes to be overlapping and creating chords. It just sounds like a bendy mess right now cause this portamento time is so long. But if I bring it down a bit. Mmm. So this always button, if I have it turned on, when I hit a note, it will always bend between the different notes. If I don't have it turned on, if I put separation between the notes, I can play the distinct note with no bend. So that was boop boop, pop, pop pop pop p p. And I'm holding this while I play the next note. So for playing styles, for live performance, this stuff is great. And I love portamento. It's really fun to play around. Right, so you can get some notes bending and others that are more defined clear pitches. So while those are the main parameters you're going to want to play around with, we could also bring in something like sinth, which is another synth that I really like. It's a little bit more complicated, I think, in terms of programming patches, but it has a really fun analog sound. Now, in that same bottom right corner, we're looking at something very similar. Portamento, how long does the portamento want to last between notes? Is it going to be short? Is it going to be, you almost can't even notice it when it's really short. But when it's a bit longer, it's pretty substantial. So somewhere around the middle, ten is fun. Mono legato is pretty fun. If you have some really short portanto or even no portamento, it allows you to play a note. And then when I hit another note, it'll flip to that note, like mono. And then when I let go, as long as I'm holding the first note, the first note will re trigger. Let's say I play C, and then I add a G. When I let go of the G, the C is going to play 'cause I'm still holding it. You can get some really fun sort of guitar tapping emulations, that sort of idea. So mono legato can be quite fun. Right now, out at the two modes, N is going to give you the ability to separate niches. And play them exactly, just like on serum if I overlap the matches. Now we have that slide. To exaggerate a bit more, here's separated. Mm. Here's over. If I set it to S, there's always going to be some good rip even if I separate those notes. So we have the ability to play individual pitches, CGA or bend between them based on the playing style that we choose on the keys. Lastly, what I'll say is that starting in Ableton 11, something called MPE became capable, which is a newer version of MIDI that allows us to do things like shake a key for vibrato, pull a finger up through a note to determine volume or pitch bends. Something like the roly keyboard comes to mind, where it's like a keyboard made of foam that has all these new MIDI capabilities. In Ableton, the wave table synth does have MPE capability. So does serum and a bunch of other VST synths, but I wanted to show you something that was native to Ableton. So I have a sound here, which sounds like this. I've created it. It's super simple. The sub is turned on. I set it to a pulse PW wave. I have the filter down slightly, and I've changed the ADSR settings slightly, but it's a very simple base part. Now, if I go into this MIDI information for this simple bass part that I recorded, you'll see we just have three pitches holding. There's our really simple bass part. Up top, we have notes, envelopes, and MPE. When I set it to PE, now when I click a note, you'll notice there's this little line that says zero semitones. Let's say starting about halfway through this note, I create a node, and by the end of that note, I want it to be up to this C here. Holding Alt allows me to snap between individual pitches. So this is up one octave. The second note, maybe I want to slide down to that third note, F. So over time, we can see exactly how far down it's sliding. You can also hold Alt to bend the pitches differently so it's not like a 45 degree angle, and that allows you to sort of get some of the pitch bend done and over with off the start and then make it more gradual or start more gradual and then accelerate that pitch bend towards the end. This base part would now sound like this. This is not a bass part that I would use in a song, but ultimately, it's up to you to be creative with this information. So whether you want to bend up or down, have it be gradual or all of a sudden, another thing you can do is you'll notice that when I hover over just in the right spot here, it turns like aqua blue. Now when I pull this down, I can say, I want you to start from a pitch that is 12 semitones below and pull into this note. So there's lots of possibilities in terms of how you can pitch bend between notes, but the important thing to note is that this is all very customizable, and you can see using the Mi keyboard where you are bending to, as opposed to on the pitch bend wheel, understanding, Okay, I'm up three semitones or up seven semitones or whatever it might be. So if you're looking to bend pitches as part of your playstyle, I would recommend the pitch bend wheel and consider automating it if over time, you need to make different pitch bend adjustments or my more personal favorite portamento or glide. What that's going to allow you to do is play your part as you usually would, but just overlap some notes when you want those pitch bends. Now, if you're a producer that likes to pencil things in a little bit more, MPE is going to be your best friend because you can see where you are starting your bends, where they are going to, and how they change over time. What's cool about this also is you can take a chord and bend all three notes into three other notes into a different chord. Sort of almost like the THX theme, but that starts from a single pitch and bends out into one full chord. So this is, of course, on base, but you can also do this with harmony, as well, now, I should also briefly mention if you're one that likes to pencil things in, if you go into envelopes and then in the bottom left corner, make sure that you're set up with MIDI Control and pitch bend. MIDI Control is easy to find. Pitch Bend is easy to find. It's a big list, but pitch bend is right at the top, so you would select that. And then you can automate the pitch bend information as you see fit. This is no longer the MPE information. You can see that's all reset. So back over to envelopes, So if you like to pencil things in, the Pitch Bend wheel automation within envelopes is a place you could do that. But again, I would recommend you explore MPE. So that's it for this class on how to pitch bend your base parts. There's lots of different ways to do it, whether you want to get surgical and really dive into things with your mouse and make sure that everything is exact in terms of timing and how the pitch bend works, you can do things that way. But if you also just want to be able to play expressively and bend some notes as you go, that's also available too. So that's it for this class. We're about to wrap things up, but I just want to thank you. I hope you had a great time in this class in this course. I'll catch you in the wrap up video. I'll see you there. 16. Outro: Thank you for taking this music production course on sampled and Synth base. My hope is that whether you're a beginner producer or intermediate level producer, there were some techniques that I was able to share with you that you might not have already known, or maybe I helped you view these techniques through a new lens to help you improve your understanding. Now, whether you want to apply Synth base, sample base or hybrid of the two, I think this is a really solid foundation starting point, having the more digital synth base available to you, but also understanding how to work with sampled base and then eventually recording in your own base as well. Many of the sample based techniques are going to apply directly over to recording in your own base. So again, most of these techniques are meant to be quite widespread and universal, and I hope that you can take them and apply them to whatever style or genre you're hoping to produce. From playing the right part to getting the right groove, to compressing things properly or synthesizing the base sound that you're hearing in your head, there's a wide variety of techniques that I've given to you, and I really hope that you're able to take them and fuse them together to create your own style. I think at the end of the day, that's where we have the edge over something like AI. Is exploring new ways to produce music that has not been done before. And how do we get there? We start with the fundamentals, we augment, permutate, and get creative to make them our own. Now, don't forget to apply these techniques often within your own productions, as this repetition of doing it over and over will help you make it muscle memory. It'll help you improve your workflow, and ultimately, you won't have to think twice about how you're going to be working with these bass parts. If you're taking private lessons in music production, I highly recommend that you take the material within this course to your lessons so that your teacher can either help you improve upon the material that I provided based on your learning style or perhaps understand the material through a new angle based on what your teacher specializes in. So again, thank you for taking this course, and if you enjoyed it, please do feel free to explore some of the other courses that I've put out on music production as they really are meant to pair together so that you can take specific areas of interest, fuse them together, to better shed light on those areas and better understand those techniques. Always feel free to reach out if you have any questions or any suggestions for future courses. And, of course, any good ratings on my courses really do help me extend my reach of my material so that I can reach new students and hopefully benefit them so that they can become better musicians and producers. So feel free to sift through the courses that I've created, see if any others resonate with you and then slowly improve those building blocks that'll help you stand out as a musician. So one last time, congratulations on getting through this course. Thank you again for taking it. I look forward to seeing you in the next course, and I'll see you there.