Music Production in Ableton Live: Learn to Write Basslines in Any Genre

1. Introduction to Bass: Base is the literal foundation of music production. Base is the attitude, the groove, and the soul of a piece of music. Yy. That's why in this class, I'm going to break down how to write baselines in any genre and how to use base sounds from Ata weights, since electric bases and Bon. Once you unlock baselines, the possibilities in music become an I'm Ben zi Maman. I have a degree in music composition, and I've been working behind the scenes in the music industry since 2010. I've written and produced songs for countless artists, and I've had the privilege to work with the writers and producers of artists like Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Luke Combs, and Many More. Recently, I've even gotten millions of streams, views, and some viral videos of my own. And I can't wait to share this decade of knowledge with you. In this class, we're going to learn how to make baselines in Ableton Live. We'll cover different kinds of baselines, a variety of base sounds, how to make your bass pop in the mix. And a little bit of music theory so that you can understand the mechanics behind a baseline. An amazing baseline can turn an average beat into a hit song. And a timeless strategy for having a number one hit song is simply having a great baseline. This class is designed to equip you with the tools and knowledge to take your music to the next level. Whether you're just starting out or trying to refine your skills, I'm here to guide you every step of the way. And don't worry. We'll keep it engaging and straightforward with plenty of practical tips that you can apply right away. I use Ableton live, but the tools and techniques that IPTs in this class can be applied to any music production software. The assignment for this class is to follow along and write a baseline of your own, either to a song of yours or to a drum loop in Ableton. So if you're ready to get your groove on, then let's make some music and get down with some bass. 2. Bass: How Low Can You Go: Welcome to the Bass chapter. And as you may have guessed, we're going to be exploring how to make different kinds of base lines and different kinds of bass sounds. Bass is the lowest part of a song. It's the low notes. Bass often lives in the C one to C two range of the piano. Sub base, which we will cover in this chapter, usually lives in the C zero range. Bass adds power, fullness, and groove. To your music. There's a variety of different sounds that can be bass sounds. You have bass guitars, guitars, pianos, synths, low brass, voice. And really, whatever the lowest harmonic part of your song is going to be considered the bass. We're going to drop the bass, and we're usually going to do that on the root note of your chord. So now that we know a little bit about bass, let's dive into this chapter. 3. Exploring Different Kinds of Basslines: There are different kinds of baselines. So let's talk about the main one. You have the long and strong baseline, which all of the Ata weight patterns use. This is very common in rap music. It's also used a lot in pop music. Honestly, even in some cinematic music, not that they're using Ata weights, but that they have just a long, sustained brass or epic sounding string sound that is the base. You have the walking baseline, which you can think of Michael Jackson. There is the rhythmic house baseline, which is a really rhythmic feeling pattern that usually happens at a house beat tempo. You have a kind of bouncy Latin baseline, which jumps usually from the root note to the fifth of the chord and then back. You have an arpeggiating style 80s bass sound, which we'll dive into. And then you have like your regular baseline, like your rock baseline, your pop baseline, the baseline that is somewhat of a combination of these different parts above. So I'm going to jump over to Spotify here where we can play some different baselines to give you some different examples. Let's start with Michael Jackson and listen to what a walking baseline real sounds and feels like. So you can hear in that base part, it's the same repeating line just over and over and over and over and over and over. And even when the chords change, because this isn't a very harmonic heavy song, the baseline isn't changing notes with the chord like a baseline normally does. So that's a pretty interesting use of the walking baseline. There are a lot of jazz songs that use the walking baseline and many other artists, besides Michael Jackson. These are just some of the most iconic baselines of all time. And so if you can start thinking in these terms, it might help you internalize this style. We'll listen to Billy Gean really quick. Again, the same stylistic approach here. We have a very short line that just repeats, and it repeats throughout the whole song. It's a really interesting use of the walking baseline yet again, which just feels groovy and makes you want to dance along to it. So those are some of the most iconic examples of the walking bass part. Now, let's listen to more of a modern pop baseline that just has a sustained note, where the bass is really not a feature at all on this song. Your ear doesn't go to it. It's just there to fill out the song and make it sound full. In this world. It just does You know. It's not the same as. In this word. It's just You know, it's not the same as the word. In this song, the bass is really, like I said, a supporting role. In the Michael Jackson songs, it was, like, almost the key part of the beat your ear goes to the baseline. In this song, your ear really doesn't go to the baseline at all. And there's just these long, sustaining notes in the chorus part that are there to fill out the song. Let's listen to blinding lights by the weekend, who did a similar approach. I've been trying to call. I've been on my own for long years. Maybe you can show me hard. Baby. I'm going to do a draws. You don't even have to do too much. You can tell me just a baby. Really, what's happening there is that the baseline is really just this really long note. It's just going burn. Basically, it is a synth part that does have a little bit of, like, a fill right before the turnaround sometimes. Basically, this is just a long note that changes with the chords, and it sounds great and a lot of hit songs will do this. Harry Styles did this. The Weekend did this. So many other people do this. It's almost like you have just a really basic seeming base part that just sounds good and feels good, because this allows the ear to go to the melodies and the other things happening in these songs. And both of these were phenomenally successful songs, which you can start internalizing, Okay, bass, super super important. But if there's other elements that you want your ear to go to, maybe you don't want to make your bass this stand out part of your song. Let's listen to a couple rap songs here. And you'll hear the eight oh eight really functions pretty similar to this pop style, just having a long base note, except the eight oh eight usually doubles the kick drum. So they tend to have a little bit more rhythmic variation, but it's still basically the same concept of a long, sustaining base note. So let's go ahead and listen to this song. No problem by Chance the rapper. End B another day at the P of M channel go through. And put the ses in the hand. C invent while we meet and M shake my other hand. Billy Rocky scooping the blessings my. B I know you tried to cheat you some never ting. So you can hear with that song that there was a base note that changed with the chords. Essentially. They had more of a rhythmic impulse to them. It wasn't like a long, dragging note. They really had some energy when they would come in almost like stabs. So eight oh eights, you can find some that do sound more like the blinding lights style, but you can also find some that have some of that shorter style. Let's go over to this heart attack song to show what the rhythmic house baseline sounds like. Good I O a little bit. Aussi's feelings are right. This bumps so hard t. This gps so hard. Spin. Yeah. What's happening in this song is that the bass note is always playing the root note of whatever chord they're on. But it's playing a very rhythmic pattern that's almost like a drum part sort of in a way because the purpose is really to make you dance, and what makes you dance more than having lots of interesting rhythms? So that's another stylistic approach. We're gonna go to this I'm good song, which is a dance song, but it's a pop song. So they have a slightly different approach to their baseline. As you know And that baseline, you can tell, has more of the blinding lights as it was style, where it really kind of is a solid note that is playing, and they are side chaining it to the kick drum, so it has a pulse to it, but it's a lot simpler of a baseline, not really a stand out part. So there's starting to be a theme here with these bigger, more modern hit songs of these simple baselines. Oh boxes. What's that? Here you can hear the classic sort of EDM approach to base, where it's really all about the sound. The bassline, which was the low no. It's not like a harmonically complicated thing, but it's like a really, really cool sound, which has a total vibe. And that's just to show you how important the sound is. Yes, it is still an interesting bass part, but it is a stand out part that is just focused on the sound. Now let's do this young folks song. I So what's going on here in the young folks song is that the base notes are usually just the root notes of the chord. But they're played at a rhythm. Like, it's not just going bone, bone, dum dum da da da dum da dum da da dum dum. So the bass note is like retriggering, because the base player is just playing and walking and playing the part more throughout the whole beat. So, you can have a combination sort of of the modern electronic pop base, which is a one long note. And then with the combination of the rhythmic house base, which is all rhythm. Now this has a real bass player, I think, on this song, who is just playing the part as it feels right to them. And it is mostly just the root notes, but a little bit more energetic since a real bass player is probably gonna just do more than hitting dum dum dum. I think that the real baseline is usually the best sounding to my ear. You can have different parts that are more melodic or less melodic. The pumped up kick song has more of a melodic baseline. It's still mostly all the root notes, but it will walk up to each next note. So we'll talk about walking your baseline up to different notes, having them usually centered on the root notes. Able to find where they want to leave the root note just to keep some interest because you can get a lot out of your base. You can get a lot of interesting rhythmic and melodic moments from your base. It's part of the rhythm section, usually. But base can really add a lot of dimension to your track, and I highly recommend that you spend all the time you need to with Base. I'm so excited for the base chapter. I love baselines. Baselines can really be the thing that just brings your whole song to life. If you have some cool chords, you got a cool B, and then you have a cool baseline, that's for me what just always seals the deal. So I love bass, and I can't wait to keep going in this chapter. 4. Basic Basslines: Let's talk about the most basic form a baseline can take. That would be whole notes that changes with the chord. Usually on the root of the chord. It will sound very powerful. It's very easy to do. You want to pay attention to the length of your notes. And this is very common in EDM, classical music, and pop music. You have shake it off by Taylor Swift, Odessa, and Firebird, by Stravinsky, all very different artists that all use this technique. So here I have a piano, and I have it looped here, and let's just click here to enlarge in it, and I will show you what I mean. So this is a this is a pretty simple part. It's just four chords. And at the bottom note of every chord, because this is the lowest note, that we have. This is our bassline. These notes here, because they are the lowest notes, they are the base. So we don't have another bass synth or bass instrument playing right now. We just have the piano, and these are the lowest notes. That means are the base. If we shift these up inctave, now these are the base, because these are now the lowest notes. They're not going to sound like base to you. Because this is a higher pitched piano, but just to get you to start to understand that the lowest note that is played technically is your base. So let's go ahead and duplicate this baseline here. I have this part selected. I'm going to hit commander Windows D, which duplicates it over. I'm hitting ship down arrow to move it down. And now we're going to o out. We're going to change the grid here, and we're going to move this part over. So, now I've duplicated our basse part It's a little bit easier to hear now. We can move it even down another octave. We can turn it up so we can really hear it. So, you can remember how this sounded without the base. Now here's with the bass. You can tell the power the bass has because this adds a whole otherther dimension in there. I think this is maybe a little bit too loud or a little bit too much for what creatively I would want to take the s. But I'm just showing you how powerful base can be. Let's do it up an octave. Oh. And base will always sound good if you play the root note of your chord. I program these chords myself, so I know what this chord is. This is a F major seven chord, and the root note of F is F. So I know that this is the root note of the or. If you have a different sample or you're playing a part and you don't know what the root note is, you can always do it by ear. Does this sound good? No. It's pretty obviously that does not sound good. What about this? No. That sounds okay, but it doesn't really feel like home. So, when you're doing things by ear, you really want to internalize what this feels like. Home. This feels like home. This is the root note. This is where you want to live. So although different options are available, O. That one is the one that feels the most like home. There were some other options in there that sounded really, really cool, and you do not have to only use the root nos. But it's a good place to start because you know it's going to sound good. And especially when you have a chord progression of different chords. Having them all just playing the root no is a safe place that you can always know, will work. That will always work. No matter what kind of music you're playing, Having a baseline that is the root note of the coord that changes with the chord, that is the length of the chord will always work. It might not be the groovist, it might not be the best, most interesting part, but you can always know that that part will function, right? Your song will be complete, and your song will work. So whenever you're in doubt, you can't come up with a really groovy baseline, just do this solid root note baseline and just know you're in the company of all of the hit songs that we studied and so many more of them. This is really something that blew my mind when I started paying attention to it. How many hit songs really just use the root note of the chord as their base and just have a long note playing for each chord. So that's just something to keep in mind. You're not in bad company if that's all that you're able to come up with with the time that you have working on your song. So something that's important about this bass part is the length of the note. So let me just show you here. If we select our bass part and we make them all shorter, That sounds cool with this specific use of just this acoustic piano. But a lot of the times when you have sins and bigger tracks, and this bass part here is not just an acoustic piano, you really want to focus on how long you want the end to be because maybe you do want it to be really short, but maybe you want it to be longer. And Usually for base notes, you want them to be longer. You don't need them to be just like this completely bleeding into every single chord, or though maybe, there's nothing wrong with the consistent baseline, and a lot of the hit songs will do this exact thing. But you could have them stopping just a little bit before each measure just to give it a little bit of breath. Remember, an actual player would not be able to play this exactly like this. A player would have a little bit of space before, so you could give it some more intentional space. It's up to you to decide, but it's super important with base, especially to pay attention to the ends of your notes. So whole notes that changes with the chord that are the length of the chord will always work for your base part. And I highly encourage you if you have a busy song to tend to do a more basic basseline. The Beatles recorded the bass last. So Paul McCartney, the bass player, would have these standout moments on the base, but only because the vocals were in, the guitars were in everything else was recorded and he was listening to the finished product. And then he could put the base only where it was necessary filling a little pocket here and there. Because usually, even though I love base and a lot of us love base, it is a supporting role. It is a foundational role. And You don't want to have a super amazing baseline that's really busy that then is distracting from the singer or distracting from the rest of the song. So you'll be amazed at how simple baselines can be to really have a profound effect on your song. 5. Basic Basslines Part 2: Let's explore how the length of your base note can really affect how it feels. Here I have a track. And let's listen to the basic baseline of having our base here, just change with the chord and be these long whole notes. So I'm going to turn the base louder than I normally would just so that we can really focus on it. Notice how that has a very different feel to it than if we made these notes really short. Having them long, has more emotional depth to my ear. Here is an example of our bass note pattern, but broken up a little bit. You can see that it triggers here. It triggers again here, and then has this little kind of funky moment where it stops and then has a quick hit, and then it keeps going. This is relatively the same amount of space being filled as this part here, but this has a little bit more to it. Finally, we have this version here, which is a broken up and a lot more rhythmic. D. So these are different examples of baselines that are all playing just the root note with different amounts of length and different amounts of notes. So this has the least amount of notes and the longest length, the medium, and this has the most amount of notes with the shortest length. Obviously, you can't have the same note playing on top of itself. So if you want to retrigger the same note and play the same D here, you would need to make it shorter so that the next note has some room to hit. If you have your notes hitting right next to each other like this, You don't really tell that these are different notes. It kind of just sounds like one note that's as long as from here to the end of the second note. This won't always be the case depending on your sound, but I have noticed that if you want your base notes to sound like different notes, you need to give space before each note. So instead of having them drag all the way next door, here, we're having them actually stop an entire beat before because this really makes it obvious that there's a space here, which makes you hear the difference between these two notes, which then enhances the rhythmic quality we're going for. So depending on if you wanted something more rhythmic, more emotional, I think for the actual song, I landed on this part here. Because this little part at the end just adds a little bit of groove, but it still has the emotional quality I liked about this part here. You can tell that these do not have enough of a space between them to really hear that these are different notes. So, effectively, this is just a really long note with the p here. And that's totally fine with me. If we really wanted to hear that these were two different notes, we would need to create more of a space before the second note. And there you can tell now there is enough space that you can hear that these are two different notes, but it's a little unclear of where the first note is ending. So that's why when you move it all the way here, suddenly we're getting close to creating this baseline, because we're now moving this to a rhythmic value way before. So, it really comes down to what you're going for. And for the purposes of base, I urge you to get something that you like, and then move on with your song, and do the rest of your song, make the rest of your beat, record the rest of your band. And keep going because at the end, in honor of the Beatles, at the end of your song is when you can come back to your bass part and say, Okay, now that everything else is in there, where are those standout moments? Where is there a moment where maybe nothing else is really the lead, and there's a pocket in the vocal. And it's the perfect time to do a little base run and catch your ear there. And base is really, really cool when it jumps out at you in just these specific little moments and pulls you into the world of the baseline. So I tend to find something that feels good in the moment that's not too complicated, then move on, and then come back at the very end and see what are those key moments that I can really make the base shine in. 6. 808s: The Power of Low Frequencies: This lesson is all about eight oh weights. So let's dive right into eight oh eights. 80 weights are similar to the whole note style baseline because it's usually a long drawn out note. They tend to change with the kick drums, although they don't have to. You might want the same eight oh eight throughout the whole song, and some songs do that. But usually nowadays, the 80 weights do change with the key and the different chords of your song, so they will pitch around. And something that you'll notice with 80 eights is that not all eight oh eights want to be transposed. Sometimes there's an amazing sample that just sounds good as it is, which might mean a few things, but it might mean that it's not the right choice for your song if you need it to go to different pitches that it just doesn't sound good. And you can add fills with eight oh eights, and adding distortion is definitely your friend. So let's dive into Ableton so I can show you what an eight oh eight is. So here we have an eight oh eight, and this is what it is. It's just a sample that's like this. I have pitched this around already. It originally was in this key here. I pitched it down. You can tell that it sounded better in its original key. This is where the eight oh eight sounded the best. I still think it sounded good when I pitched it ad, and I pitched it because I am using a drum loop here and a melodic loop. So I wanted the eight to e to be in pitch with what we were hearing, so I needed to change the pitch of the 828. So what I did here, we can go back to our original track and try to recreate what I did so I can walk you through this process. So we have an 808 here, and it's not in the right key, but we like the sound of it, and we think it has a good vibe, and we're listening to the rest of our track. So one way we can approach this as we can go to a spectrum, pull the spectrum down onto the eight oh eight, and we can see that here, this is a big section of this, which seems like this might be the note that we're hearing. We scroll a cursor to the middle of this. And we see it says G sharp down here. It also has another point up here, which is also a G sharp. That's a good sign because usually when you're distorting things, the same octave becomes very loud and prominent. The next thing up here was the fifth, which is a D sharp. That's a good sign, so we can be kind of confident that this is a G sharp, and the spectrum is a good way to use that. What do we do with that information? Well, we can see here that this says it's in the key of F. I know that it's minor because it just sounds minor. You can hear that minor quality to it. And so because this is a G sharp, and we want it to be an F, because we want it to be in the same key as our sample, we would then pitch this down. If we pitch it down one, it goes to G. Pitch it down two, it goes to F sharp and pits it down three, and we are at F. That's if you notice here, I pitch this down three here, I did as well. And that sounds like the root to me. So you can use the spectrum as one way to find what the note is of your eight oh eight in case you're not sure. You can also pitch it by ear. But when I'm pitching by ear, I actually like to go up, to go up an octave or maybe even two octaves. Because this helps me here if it's in key or not. So this doesn't sound good. So let's try this. And this sounds good here. It sounds like our melody is bending, the eight oh weight's bending. It stops really being in key. Near the end of this part of the sample here, which you can notice in the actual track, I cut this part of the sample. And so we'll get into the rest of this rhythm here. But if you're going by ear, sounds pretty good until this point. Shift down arrows, moves this down an octave. And what we found again is that it's this minus three. So we found the same note doing it by ear and doing it by the analyzer. So we can be pretty confident that this is a good note for us. What I did here is the 80 weight is changing with the kick drum. It doesn't hit on this kick drum here. And yes, once you've been producing for a while, you'll be able to tell that these things are the kick drums. I just know what they look like. I don't expect you to know what they look like, but you can take my word for it. We can just sold just the drums, and we can tell one, two, three, four kick drum. Bum pone. So eight oh eights will change with the kick drum a lot of the time. Not all the time, as you can see, we're not doing it with this pattern that you could. There's nothing stopping you, and it probably wouldn't sound bad. But let's just leave this one alone for now so we can have some of that long riding eight oh eight feeling. And let's just have it re trigger with these kick drums. So we're going to paste one here, and then we're gonna cut this with Commander Windows Z and then we're gonna duplicate and drag this out. Now we have this pattern. So this sounds good because it's hitting and retriggering with these kicks, and it sounds good because our sample started getting a little bit out of pitch here at the end, and so we're not even using that. So that was really lucky. What else did I do here? I had our eight oh eight changing it again on this other kick drum, so we could copy our eight oh eight and paste it here. Then I had our eight oh eight again playing, not changing with this kick drum, changing with these two, actually changing with these three. So this is our part now. So, this doesn't sound bad, but the melody is changing here. Bum, bum So because the melody is changing, I thought, why not have our base change. So um And I wanted it to be that note because that's what this melody is doing. So I wanted this base note to harmonize with the note that we're hearing here. You can do this again by ear. And this sounds good to me. I also know that this here bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. I can hear that this pattern is one and five. Not all producers are able to just hear that, but if you can internalize the quality of this, bum bum bum bum That's what minor one and five sound like. And as you spend some more time producing, you'll start hearing more of the different common chord quality. This is just a very common chord change here. One to five is actually the most common chord change in classical music. So whether you can hear that or not, and you just want to change your baseline, you can do it by ear. If this sample isn't telling you. This sample isn't giving you more information besides F. So you know that it is in F. You doesn't know what these different notes are, so you really are going to have to do this by ear now. So you just move the note around like we did and then see what sounds good. So eventually, you'll land on something that sounds good to you. You can always use the spectrum analyzer and make sure that the notes that you're picking are in the same scale as the original notes. You had a G sharp and now You know, you could try the big ones. You could try the six away from G sharp, you could try the fourth, you could try the fifth. Those are all good things to try. Usually, if you're leaving the root note, try the two, try the four chord, the five chord, or the six chord. Between two, four, five and six, one of those will sound good 90% of the time. So you don't have an endless option to choose from. You really do have some set options. But what we're noticing here is that this is really standing out. And I don't wanted to stand out that much, so we're going to pitch it down an octave. That sounds better to me. So this one is going down an octave, this one goes down an octave. We cut our baseline, our base right at the end at the end of this loop so that it is not just continuously dragging, there's some relief, some space, which really, to me, adds a lot of energy to the beat. And to my ear, this sounds really great. I know I'm going over picking different base notes pretty quickly, and maybe this is difficult for you, and maybe you can't really tell what you're hearing or trust. I always suggest just trust your ear. There really, like I said, the root note is going to be where you're probably going to start 90% of the time, especially with rap music, especially if you're using eight weights, you're probably just going to try to find that root note. Once you've found the root note, try the two chord, the four chord, the five quarter, or the six chord. I know that might sound like a lot, but they're just not because you're going to try it really quick, and it's going to either going to sound good or not. L et's say this method isn't right for you. You can also for the reason we're talking about melodically, or just out of any other preference, or sonically, and sometimes I just do it this way, also. There are eight oh eight synths. So we have an instance of serum here which has an eight oh eight preset, which sounds like this. And sometimes you just have a synth of an 808 that sounds exactly what you want to use, and that's perfect because here it's a lot easier to see the notes that we're playing because you can just program in just like anything else with the piano roll, the notes you want to play. So we're usually playing the F the root note, but sometimes we go down to the C. Notice that the 808 is re triggering with those different kick drums. So that's a little bit harder to see. So what you're going to do is you just kind of have to look, Okay, our kick drum is hitting twice here. We want this to hit with the kick drum. Yes, it does look like our hits are lining up. But let's say I move this over here. Okay, that now does not seem like it's gonna line up. Let's separate this visually. And then you can say, Okay, this is lining up here, and then this can line up. Maybe Maybe you do want the space or maybe you don't. But sometimes visually, if you just create make the notes shorter to just move them around, you can see them better to line them up because it's a little harder in the note view, but then easier to program the specific notes that you want. On top of this just being a different method, a different style. You know, you could choose, here we chose the fifth. Let's try what the fourth would sound like. That doesn't sound good. Let's try what the sixth would sound like. That doesn't sound good either. What does the second sound like? Yeah, it's better better than some, but the fifth was clearly the best sounding option. And like I said, two chord, four chord, five quarter, six chord. 90% of the time, one of those is going to work. This has just a different sonic quality than this does. Actually, our sample there is an octave lower, so we can try this an octave lower. Click in the empty space, Commander Windows A, shift arrow key down. Now that has a more similar quality. Maybe you want it to be si and snappier sounds come from there being more of a space between the notes. You can try even more space between the notes. Or maybe you prefer the sound of the sample. Or just this sin. So those are just two different ways that you can do 80 weights. You can use a sample and pitch it around or not or leave it the same because that works for some songs, or you could find an 808 type synth or throw an 808 sample into a sampler in Ableton, and you can in your notes on the piano. Both have their pros and cons, and it's really up to you and what you like best. And then for me, personally, I will just go for the sound quality, because I can work in both methods pretty comfortably. If I find the right 808 sample for the song, I'll go the sample route. If I find the right synth for the song, I'll go the synth route because 80 weights are relatively simple parts, and it really comes down to the sound, the sound design. What is the right sound for your song? So I encourage you to take a little bit of time and be picky when choosing your sound. You don't need to just pick the first one that you hear. Although sometimes that's the best one and you just feel it and you know it, and if you feel it, it's always the right choice. 7. Leave Your Roots: Alternative Bass Notes: Sometimes our roots empower us and sometimes they hold us back. So in this lesson, we're going to be exploring leaving the root note of your chord and exploring some different note options for your base. Base doesn't have to just be the root note. Base can be any note in the chord. You can play the third, the fifth, seventh and beyond. When you're writing your baseline, it's important to look to these notes, the third, the fifth, seventh for where to go first. Obviously, you always want to trust your ears. You always want to be mindful of the lengths of your notes, and there's some common patterns in Latin music that often center around the one and the five of the Cort. So let's go explore. Here I have a drumbeat, and we're going to explore a baseline that I played that goes from the root to the fifth of the Cort. So we can see that our piano is doing just two chords. We're playing an A minor chord here, and we're playing E major chord here. That's one and five in minor. So we're going to go here to our baseline. And what are we gonna play? Well, I actually played this on my midi keyboard, but if I didn't, I would still gravitate towards the A for the A minor chord and the E for the E major chord. And That's because those are the root notes of our chord. And even when we're talking about leaving our roots and using other notes. We're still playing mostly the root note of the chord. But here we're bouncing between the root note of our chord, and we're also playing the fifth of our chord. You can go up to look at the chord itself, and you'll see that these are triads, three note chords, and every single one of these notes is an option. You could play an A, a C, or an E. And in this chord, you could play an E, A G sharp or a B. All of those would be good options to play if you didn't want to just use the root note. So for the purposes of this, let's study this baseline really quick. I thought this was a little groovier than this one, so I'm trying to recreate that pattern cause that sounded good to me. But for what we're talking about, we're going from our root note here, and we played a little instead of just going bam, which we could have done. I'm playing a little bit of a pattern. We could have tried going to the S instead of the fifth. And that sounds really great, also. You could also try instead of the fifth of this chord, going to the third. You could try going to the th f and then going up to the fifth. Now we're using all the notes of our or. And that sounds good, too. It really depends on what you're going for. You could try going from the root to the fifth to the third to the fifth again. And we'll recreate that pattern down here as well. I'm just trying to get the ball rolling so that you can see, Okay, with a triad, a three note chord, you can use all three of the notes. I am starting with the root note. You don't have to, but I tend to find that that does usually sound best to me. But there are no rules, and I encourage you to try all of these different chord notes available, because you can already see now we're creating kind of a melody with our baseline. And it's cool. It has some variation to it. I like this rhythm that I played, but you could just also do this with solid notes. 88. Here you can really tell with the specific base synth that I'm using. It is a synth that's meant to sound like a real base. I love this sound. It's called Trillion, and we'll talk way more about this sound. But you can hear how the velocity is really affecting the sounds. And even though the variation is cool, let's just go ahead and click in this empty space, select everything with Command A, and bring the velocity up uniformly and then bring it ale. And that sounds way more generic and way worse, but now we're focusing on just the notes, and I do want to be clear that we're hearing just these notes here. Or maybe you like this better. Now, just by using the different notes of our chord, we're creating a baseline, which is really cool. Our base is coming to life. Let's try this baseline that I wrote over here, which is a little bit busier, but it's also just playing all the different notes in the ord. If you hit fold, it gets rid of every note that's not being played, and you can see every note that's being played is either an A, C or an E, in this first or or an E, a G sharp or a B in the second. This could use ale bit of quantized. You can even hear it well in this beat. But let's just focus on the notes here. So, this was obviously a pattern that was played, um, um, um, um, at these different harmonic values here. And you can explore playing with different rhythms and programming different rhythms and using the different notes of your to start building interesting sounding baselines. I love playing in the bass part. I am a keyboard player, so playing in is something that comes naturally for me in that respect. If that's not you, you can program amazing basslines as well, and you just can see how easy and fun it is just to spend some time in the piano role looking for the different notes of your chord. And it's okay to take some time to find your bass part. I love bass so much. It really adds so much emotional depth and groove. So it's really okay to spend a little bit of time trying to find your perfect baseline, and I hope that you explore using all the different notes available in the chords that you're playing. 8. Rythmic House Basslines: Now, let's talk about the rhythmic house baseline. So let me play you what I mean. This is what I'm calling the rhythmic house baseline. It's a very rhythmic part that is usually with a sound that's kind of like this, a sound that's like, very percussive and short decay, meaning that the sound itself doesn't have a long note. It's not an 808 that goes boom. It's really like dum, dum, really short. And because it's short, you need a lot of notes so that you're getting enough base. So this is a part here that I played. You can play, you can program for these kinds of parts. It's kind of fun to program them because you just kind of want to go rhythm crazy. I like having a general call and response thing. Yes, I usually use the root notes of the cord. It's not necessary. You can explore using the third, you can explore using the fifth, the seventh, whatever you want. But I usually have a four bar cord loop. It's cooler if you have something more complicated than that. So we have a call and response rhythmically from the first bar to the second bar, which then repeats with the third bar and the fourth bar. And the rhythm, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. It's just call and response rhythm from 1 bar to the next, and then back and forth is really great for these rhythmic house parts. So let's listen focused on that aspect. This is just a really fun way to do base, and I love this style and this genre. Let's quickly go to our 16th notes here. And let's just say you want to create this from scratch or something like this. I just want to show you how much fun it can be just to program some of these parts. And we could maybe try this as a repeating pattern. Or maybe it's a having all three of these hits here. It's just to go to show that you can just have fun picking these rhythms. Maybe we'll just put some holes and just see how this sounds like. And this sounds pretty good. The ends of both of these rhythms are the same. Butt, butt. So that maybe we would want to change something around so that it's not quite the same ending to give some more rhythmic variation here. Or maybe we'd want to keep that one the same and change the rhythmic value of the first one, but either way, that already sounded better to me. It's really up to you. And you can just have so much fun exploring with different rhythms and drawing in different rhythms, and playing different rhythms. And this genre is like I said, it's just a ton of fun, and I love just exploring all the rhythmic possibilities here. I encourage you to just explore what the different rhythmic values feel like. The different patterns feel like. Maybe you just want to go randomly and just start clicking on the root notes of every chord and just seeing what it sounds like. Or maybe you have a vision in your head, and that's the rhythm that you are going for. Either way, this is a ton of fun, and I highly encourage you to just explore making some baselines in this style because it will help you make baselines in every other genre as well. 9. Walking Basslines: Listen to some walking baselines earlier in this chapter. Now we're going to dive in how to make them. So the walking baseline unlocks every single note in the scale. This is really cool because now we're no longer just having to use the root notes or even the notes in the chord. Now we can use every note in the entire scale, because you simply walk from whatever note you're starting from to the next note that you want to go to, and you can walk there chronologically using every note of the scale. And that usually sounds pretty good. You can create a whole riff from this because this is a very melodic technique. And Sometimes the baseline can be a repeating part that is independent of the chords as we heard in Michael Jackson. This is only kind of true literally, but the feeling is that the chords are changing, and the baseline is staying the same. So let's meet these chords and dive into this baseline. So what's happening here? We are playing the root note, which is A, and then we're walking up to the third note, which is C. And then we're jumping down to the E. So, when you look at this in the big picture, Okay, this isn't that different from just using the different notes in the chord. If we're talking about an A minor here, the only note that's not in a minor chord is this B. So what we've done here, we're playing basically just eighth notes. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. And then it's a little bit different here. But the most of this pattern is pretty basic. Two. Two. Let's get rid of this little grace note for now. Two. 222. So this has a lot of energy because eighth notes have a lot of energy at this tempo. But here it's just a long note up top, and then this is hitting at a 16th note. Bum bum, bum bum. And then this hits twice. So we're using a combination of eighth notes, one 16th note hit here, and this one's a little bit longer. It's not quite the length of three 16th notes, but it is longer than an eighth note here. And this is a pretty simple pattern, but what we're doing is we're walking to the C here. And the only note that we can walk up using that is in the scale of A minor is B. So if we go over here to our scale function, and we go to A, and we go to minor, and we unfold, we can see. In order to get to C, there's an A. There's a sharp, which is not available to us in the key of A minor, then there's a B and then there's a C. So if we want to go from A to C, and we want to walk there. The only note we can try to walk there with is this B. 18. Why do I have this little grace note, this little 16th note before the downbeat. It's because Michael Jackson did it in T thriller, and I think it sounds good. So this is just a little hack that I do when I'm emulating this kind of style because it goes, Baa, dah, dah, B, dah, dah, dah. What's happening is the base notes hitting right before the kick, and that has that kind of groove, and that's the thriller baseline. So here, what we're doing going for a little bit of that same style. But maybe it sounds a little much doing it every single time. So maybe we'll stop it on every other be. It's really up to you. But the point is what we're doing here that's interesting to pay attention to is that we're starting on this A, walking up to the s with using this B. And then when we're in the C, we're just jumping to the fifth of the chord, because I felt like if we just mute these es. That's great. It doesn't need the E. It sounds good on its own. You could maybe even just have tried this, keeping this pattern going here. And that sounds good, too. There's really nothing wrong with doing this any other way. But I liked how it sounded jumping to the E, and I got to this specific note because it's a note in the chord. So when you're walking, you can walk using any note in the scale. But when you're jumping, you should probably just jump to a note that is also in the chord. So, you wouldn't really want to jump from an E to a B because a B is not really in the chord. There are no rules, and for all I know, you're going to come up with the coolest baseline I've ever heard in my life, and you're going to do just that. But for the most part, you want to walk chronologically with notes in the scale. We'll go back to the scale view, and you can jump to really any note that's in the chord. But for instance, you could walk from C to D to E. C D E would be another some notes you could walk from or you could walk EF G A. Any of these, like, adjacent notes within the key are available to walk to. So, this is just a quick example of this walking baseline. Let's turn the cords on because we're going to show you how the cords are changing, but the walking baseline is not, and it still works. Here's our A minor. And it's the least harmonious with this last chord. This first chord is an A minor. The second chord is a C major, which shares a lot of the same notes as a minor. Really the main difference is a G or an A. But this gets a little more advanced. But if you add an A to a C minor chord, depending on what you're playing in the base, it becomes an A minor seven because then suddenly the notes that you have available that you're playing are A, C E and G, which is those are the notes of an A minor seven chord. Even if your A is in a different place, it's still those same notes, C E, G and A, and those are the notes in an A minor seven. So since we are starting our baseline on the A note, you hear this like an A minor seven kind of. But then we get over to this F chord, and even though A is part of this F It's the least harmonious version, specifically because the B is not harmonious at all with this F chord. A B is a tritone, which is a very dissonant sound to this F. You may not want to pick this chord in particular. You could audition some other chords here, but it still sounds pretty good altogether, having a baseline that's not changing with the chords here. You can mute this F or we could just find a different note for this F. Try down in G. Or get rid of it. So, this lesson was really to show you that you can use all of the notes in the scale in your baseline, which is really exciting. You can always start by looking for your root notes. You can always go to the second place of looking for the th, fifth, or the seventh or the other notes in the. And then once you kind of have the notes you want to play with, L et's say you're starting at your root note, you're going up to the third. Why not use the second? Walk up there. Let's say you're starting on the root note, and you're going up to the fifth. You can walk up using the second, third, fourth, and the fifth. And walking your baseline from one note to another has a very live feeling to it. A lot of bass players will naturally do things like that. So it adds another dimension, and it adds an obvious harmonic depth because you're playing more notes. So I love walking baselines, and I love incorporating different notes of the scale in the base part when it's appropriate. 10. 80's Rolling Basslines: One of my favorite baseline styles is the 80s rolling baseline. So in this lesson, I'm going to be talking to you about what that is and how to do it. So what's going on here? For this sound, I'm just playing one long note and another long note. And what's happening here is we're going into a synth that sounds like this. Let's slete these audio effects, so we're not confused. We're going into a synth with just a long note. That's it. So this is not that interesting at all, but what we can do is pull an arpeggiator down. So you go to these midi effects and you go to arpeggiator and you pull that down in front of the synth. So it doesn't matter that I'm using nexus, I could be using operator or analog or any sound at all. You can arpeggiate any midi sound. And when you turn on an pegiator, It will retrigger the note or notes that you have in your mid clip in certain different ways. So if you had a chord outlined, it could arpegate up the chord. But in this case, I just have one note, so it's retriggering that note, and it has this sound. If we were to change the rate, the speed at which this was happening, it would change how fast we're hearing this base part. So let's listen really fast. That's ridiculously fast. Here slower. But right here at this specific tempo 105, at this speed 16th notes, has that sort of 80s rolling feel, which is what I'm going for. The gait affects how scato or wide the sound sounds. Which depending on the input sound has variety of different effects on the sound. That's really it. You just hold a note down with an pegiator on it, and it sounds cool. So obviously, the lead sound, this. This sound might not catch your ear as the sound you would pick to then arpeggiate, which is why you can throw an arpeggiator on just really any sound and then choose your sounds with the arpeggiator on it already. So we could go here to operator and try some different bases. And now that the arpegiator is on it, you can quickly hear how it's going to sound. Of course, all of these operator patches are sounding a little too high pit, so we pits it all down. This is a very different vibe, but it's also. You could jump up to analog and try some of these based sounds. We'll see what this sounds like. The arpeggiating base technique has a really powerful and almost cinematic feel to it, and I love this technique. So I highly encourage you just drop a basic, long note, long bass note in there and throw an pegiator on and just comb through some presets. In the analog preset bases, Analog being kind of vintage in this being an 80 style, that's a good place to look. But this sound and this technique applies to even more modern sounds. It doesn't have to be limited to an eight style sound. You can use this arpeggiator technique for any sound you want. 11. The Ideal Bassline: There's a lot of different styles of bass sounds, but now I really want to dive into the ideal baseline, because the ideal baseline is whatever fits your specific song. So it can have a bit of a walk to it. It can have a little bit of the root notes going to the different notes of the chord, and some combination of those together is probably what's going to be best for your song. So the ideal baseline, unless you're going for a specific sound, you probably want some kind of long root notes walking to the next root note of the next chord. Humble is always good, but base needs to be practical and supportive at least most of the time. Let's go ahead and look at a baseline that I wrote for a song of mine. C. So I'm gonna turn this base way louder than I actually said it in the song just to make sure we can really focus on the base for this lesson. C. So let's go ahead and look what we did here. These are the root notes of the chord, G, and then B, and then C. And then this here is a D sharp, or in this case, it's more of an E flat. And it is the third of the chord in this specific instance. But this is a really rare and unique situation. If you're in a major key and you play the minor four chord, You may want to use the third in the base. But that's a very, very specific situation. You can always use the third in the base if you want to, but usually in commercial music, I don't tend to. This is the one situation where I do that. But for the purpose of this lesson, let's consider all of these are the root notes of the chords. So we're mostly spending time on the root notes. We're mostly spending time here With half notes, they start on the downbeat here. Dom. This one starts on the fourth note before the next bar. So it has a little bit of a syncopated feel. This is also where the kick drums hitting. So it's a little bit of that eight oh eight style, where it's like a long note that's hitting with the kick, that's sort of where this comes from. It also just feels really natural to play here, which is also why I chose to do this. But you can see this basic pattern and if we mute everything else, this is essentially the bedrock foundation of this entire baseline. This fills the song and gives you power, but it's lacking in groove. And you can tell that these higher notes were always in a little bit of a pocket where the vocal was a little less sparse, and the rest of the song was a little empty. So without these, you are missing something. We're missing something. So The first thing is we jump up here to the fifth. So this is G, which is the root. We jump up to the fifth. Here, B is the root, we jump up to the fifth, F sharp. C is the root, we jump up to the fifth. And then this last one has more of a leap. We are actually jumping up an octave. And this is more of a base fill of a base run. But what I want to show you here is that the foundation of this is we're playing root notes, and then we're jumping to the fifth, which is another note in the chord. So so far, we're just using the root notes, and we're using the fifth, another note in the chord. Now, this still doesn't seem like it has enough swing to it. So what we did here is we jumped up to the fifth. And then we walked down to the next root note. Now, this walk is not perfect because we're skipping a note, but it still fits within this general pattern of jumping up a fifth and then walking to the next base note, which is exactly what we're doing here. And then at the end, all we're doing is we're just walking a little bit more. This is more of a fill, this part here. It's more of like its own stand out moment. A. And that sounds pretty good. It's just lacking a little bit of groove to me. So what we did here is for these two notes, we added a really short It's an eighth note, but it's late. So it's like in between an eighth note and a 16th note. It's almost the length of an eighth note. But the fact that it's late, it's really live feeling. It's really in a very specific pocket. That I played and then tweeted to be exactly where I'm hearing it. And this is to impulse a little bit of groove. It's to add the quick notes really do add rhythm. So here, let's listen to this now with this little note here to just add some groove to the entire track. A Do d. And I forgot this hit here is we were supposed to do the same thing. Do So, you can hear how just adding this little tiny note added a lot of life to our baseline. Yeah, we're using it as like a springboard to jump from the root to the fifth, and then we're walking down to the next root. So, this is a pretty solid picture of how a baseline for a song could really look. I'm not going for any kind of electronic 80s or Pegating base. I'm not making like an EDM house track with the rhythm thing. I'm not doing, like, bass music with some crazy sins. I am doing a rock song, kind of like an Indie song, and it wanted a real feeling baseline. And we did a little bit of the eight oh eight pattern. So it's kind of long, but it's got some groove, and it walks a little bit, and it's mostly root notes and notes in the chord. But we have these stepping stones to the next note that we want, and we have a little bit of a fill here. So I would say this is a pretty solid example for what a base line can look like in an Indie song or a non genre specific song. 12. Sub Bass: Dive into the Depths: This lesson, we're going to be learning all about sub base. Sub base is a relatively modern development in music in the grand scheme of things, and it is felt more than it's heard. Sub is club. It's what rattles your car. It's what you hear outside of a club. It's what makes dance music or electronic music or club music feel so powerful live. It's just a copy of your baseline down an octave in a perfect sinewave, usually. So let's explore what subbase sounds like. Here in our song, we have a base. See Sub, you're almost certainly not gonna be able to hear without headphones, so just keep that in mind. It's really meant for live, that really low frequency that just rattles everything, and you really feel it's called Sub, and it's actually a track of its own. So what you do, you copy your baseline and you pull it onto your sub track probably down an octave. So this middy part is exactly the same part as this middy part. And it should be the exact same because you don't want your sub to feel different. You actually want your sub to just seamlessly feel like the lowest dimension to your existing bass sound, most of the time. So if you're not wearing headphones or not listening on speakers, you probably can't hear this at all, but that's okay because it's only for those environments. It's super important in your car and super important live. And it does make a difference in most pairs of headphones because you can usually hear or feel some kind of sub through your headphones these days. So what is? I here am a instance of serum, but it's just a sine wave. It's just a sine wave. That's all that it is. And yeah, you can get a little bit fancy with a little bit of distortion and a little bit of filters. But all that stuff is honestly just distracting because sub just needs to be a sine wave. So we can go over to operator, basic sine sub and use this. I try this sign sub, which is actually the same just without not inside of a instrument rack here. And here it's pitched up 12, maybe it's too high. You want your sub to be an octave lower than your base in that really powerful ratily zone. Then when your sub is there, you want to usually back it down in volume because when you're playing live, mic is super loud anyways. You don't need your sub to be really loud for it to feel powerful live. Depending on the kind of music, you have different levels of sub. If you're working on like a rap song that's not using an eight to eight, you're probably going to have a pretty loud sub. If you're working on like an EDM song, you might have a pretty loud sub. But if you're working on like an Indie song or a pop song or some other kind of genre, you probably want your sub to be a lot quieter, but you definitely want a sub. Almost all modern music today has this frequency is taken care of. It's usually by the sub. Once in a blue moon, you'll have a kick drum that's just sitting there alone without a sub. But for the most part, and if you're producing music, you just want to have a sub. It's just good practice, and it will make your music sound modern and it'll make it sound powerful. So whatever your base sound is, you just Commander Windows C, commander Windows V, copy your base mitti part when your baseline is done, and then you paste it here into your sub, and then you're good to go. This has some processing on it. What I will do here some of the time is you can high pass your base so that your base is not giving any frequencies down here because this is where your subs going to live. So, this isn't necessary because a basic sine wave will not have any upper harmonics, but you could look at what your sub looks like. Now we are high passing our base so that it's not fighting with our sub, and you're getting rid of any high end of your sub so they wouldn't be fighting your kick or your base. Some subs have some distortion on them, which then you want to maybe tone down a little bit, or maybe not, depending on your personal choice. But for the most part, I will high pass my base, and I will the subregion untouched and undisturbed with nothing else down here except for the sub and a little bit of the kick so they can really cut through in a clean way, because the last thing you want is a low end mess of too much low end of your base and your sub and your kick, and it's just not diving together. You want your low end to be clean, for sure. But you don't always have to high pass your base. That's just up to you to decide. Listen, does it sound better with it on, with it off. If you can't tell Go ahead and leave it off. Don't add something in the mix if you can't tell what it's doing. Only use it if you actually think it sounds better, and then have your sub an octave lower. You can affect the octave here in the synth itself, or in the actual track, Commander Windows A to select all, shift arrow Key down, shift arrow key up, and that will move all of these tracks up or down an octave. And There you go. Sub is used in virtually all music these days. It really is lacking when you don't have sub and you listen to music on nice speakers or in your car. You definitely definitely want to always have a sub, but it's really simple. It's simple to get a big and powerful sound just using a basic sine wave. So Sub is a lot of fun. There's some genres just built all around Sub. And it's just I highly recommend just listening to some headphones and just feeling the power of your subbase because sometimes you don't need a whole lot else in your low end when your low end is really just feeling up and feeling so powerful with your sub. If you've ever been in a movie theater where it just rattles the whole theater, that's also subbase. So subbase can be cinematic, as well as commercial, as well as indie or dance or any genre whatsoever. I highly recommend that you incorporate subbase into your music. 13. Acoustic Bass Sounds: Are a lot of different base sounds out there. And I want to go over a little overview of what are some common acoustic based sounds so you can have that in your arsenal. The most common acoustic base sounds are the electric base by far. You can use a double base for more of an acoustic version of that. You can use a piano, just the low notes of a piano. You can use just the lon notes of a guitar, and there's some orchestral acoustic basses, which are like strings, like the double base, I said, There's brass and woodwinds. So by far, the winner usually is the electric base. This is usually the sound of a base in all of rock and roll, all of Indie music, a lot of pop music. Just a lot of music in general that doesn't have a synth base usually uses some form of the electric base. I am using a plug in called Trillion, which I did buy, but it has the best acoustic base sounds I've ever heard. And it really is so much fun to use, and you can just swip through all these different presets here. It even has some synth presets. So it is not limited to acoustic sounds. But it has the best acoustic base electric base I've ever heard and so many to choose from from pick to muted to funk and just literally everything. And I'm not sponsored by them or any kind of thing. I just really, really like this plug in. You can also use Ableton sampler if you go ahead and find in our samples here, find an acoustic base plug. You can use that You can pull this here down into a sampler. So let's go ahead and grab a sampler real quick. Pull that down. Go over to samples, pull our base, and then here we go. We have our base sampler ready to go. Just remember that this is starting on the no A, so C zero is really going to be A. If the tune of it is confusing to work with, I would suggest pitching the sample. You can go here and there are several ways to do this, but if this is an A, you could pitch it up three to turn this into a C. And then you could actually use this as the sample instead of R A. So I'm just going to drag this pitched up base hit here, and I pitch this up three to pitch it to C because C is three half steps above A, and if our note is starting on C, then when we play a C on the keyboard, it'll also be a C in our sampler. If we left it at A, when we play a C on the keyboard, it would actually be an A, which is just unnecessarily confusing. Now we can listen to our base part. You could audition different bass samples here. This is a different bass guitar note. Bass guitar feel. And they have a lot of different options. These are in F. So if you wanted to be a C, you would have to pitch that accordingly. But this is how you can use the sampler to get some really cool bass sounds. Let's say you wanted to use a different kind of acoustic bass sound. Well, there's piano. You could use another acoustic bass. You could use a low flute sound or a low string sound, or even a guitar sound. So there's a whole world of acoustic bass sounds available. Like I said, the most common is the electric base. There is a whole wide variety of acoustic bass sounds available, and I encourage you to go into the samples, find some unique samples, and pull them into a sampler and try to see what bass sounds you can find. 14. Synth Bass Sounds: Lesson is all about synth based sounds. So synth based sounds. We have the analog old school sounding bases. We have plucky bases. We have fat re sounding bases. We have dirty bases and way too much more as bass music has really exploded in the 21st century. So let's go and really look at all of these different synths. Synth base is such a broad term that it's almost hard to just talk about what is synth base. So it's anything. Any synth that's a base is a synth base. And there's so many different styles. You can use third party plug ins like serum. You can use different sins like Omnisphere. You can use all of the different sins here in Ableton. They all have base presets. We have this base analog. So analog tries to do more of a retro sound. We have obviously I'm not even going to go into instrument rack because there's so many amazing sounds there. We can go to Operator. Oh. And the difference of sound is pretty dramatic of what we're hearing from a pluck sound to an organ sound to whatever this is gonna sound like. Y. I talked in the slide about re spaces, and those are just a detune synth. This detune from itself, and it just creates a really wide sound. But usually, the re space is more of a sustained note. This is a pretty distorted re space. They don't have to be. It's called a basic re space. It's essentially a synth that just has two waves that are detuned from each other a significant amount, and it just kind of creates this really wide but distorted sounding sound. There are so many options here. And I hope that you can see how with the same part going through all of these different bass sounds here in Ableton, that you're able to dramatically change the quality of the same exact part. These same notes hit different depending on what sound you're using. You can make your own sounds. You can do your own custom sound design to make your own base sounds. You can use third party synth. You can use Ableton synths. You could even go to the Ableton samples and pull those into a sampler. So you'll have some sample sampler synth bases. There's really a wide, wide world of synth base available. And it takes a long time to explore it all and to get familiar with it all. But in the beginning stages, I encourage you just flip through the presets in Ableton. There's amazing presets. And just go ahead, go to the base category and just pull a few different sounds in and start to understand what sounds are best suited for your song, what sounds sound better with different parts. You'll notice that quick faster, more walking parts tend to have the more plucky sounds, and then the longer slower parts tend to go for the more rese, the more wider distorted sounds, and everything in between. So you can start building your emotional catalog as a producer by just listening to how the different presets affect the same part. And you'll slowly start building your producer archive. 15. Bass Samples and Loops: Base samples and base loops are also a big part of music production. So let's jump right into base samples. Base samples can be used in sampler. They can be used just free on their own on the grid. And you'll notice that some base samples don't want to be pitched around. So, in which case, you just have to either pitch your whole song to the sample or just find a different sample. Here I have a base loop from a sample pack that I have, and it's an entire song ready to go already. I just pulled in a drum loop, I pulled in a base loop, and There you go. We're done. Lessons over. Just kidding. But you can see how quickly you can start making music with base samples. You don't even need to play a part. You don't even need to really find a sound. You just find a cool sample, and you're ready to go. So, let's go ahead and go into Ableton samples here and see what are some bass samples we can use. So this is more of a electronic one shot, so you could pull this into a sampler and build a part out of this. Here is a low brass part, which goes under our acoustic based sounds. Here is a nice subbase patch in case you're wanting to create a sub base with the sampler. Some cool sins you could use. And that's a cool subfaul. So let's go here. We're going to create a new track, and we're going to pull in our sampler, and we're going to go to the samples, and we're going to take this sample here. Pull it in. We're going to mute this basep that I had. We're going to select the space, put in a midi clip, and let's go ahead and write a quick baseline. Go to go here and turn this up in volume. A sank. I'm going to just record a quick little baseline that I'm going to play on my computer keyboard. That's a super basic part, but I'm just showing you how you can grab any of these samples. Pull them into sampler and write a little part. This would want a completely different part. So this would be more like this. This might have a similar part, maybe? Or maybe this would be more like this. Move the starting point over. These are not masterpieces that I'm making here. I'm just trying to show you how you can find a sample, pull it into a sampler and make a quick baseline. Obviously, you would want to spend time finding the exact sound that works for your song and writing the best part that you can, not just the first thing that you can think of in 30 seconds. I'm going to go over where you can find some amazing, high quality third party samples. They're going to come in sample packs, and in those sample packs, sometimes you're going to find some base loops and base samples. You can do what I did and just pull a whole loop in there, or you can find more of the one shots like we have in Ableton, pull those into a sampler and make a part out of that. There's no right or wrong answer here, and I just want to show you all the different possibilities that music producers are doing so that you're aware of everything. And then from there, you can choose how you would best want to produce your songs. 16. Recording Live Bass: Let's talk about recording live base. You'll need to connect to your audio interface. You'll need to lower the sample rate. You'll have to decide if it's DI or a mic, probably DI direct in, which is the Ox cable, I call it or the quarterins cable. You'll probably want to use your metronome, you got to tune it, and you might even want to comp your part. You'll want to get your audio interface ready. You're going to want to plug in your quaran cable into the input of your audio interface, and then the other quarter and then the other side plugs into your base. Now, I know what you're thinking. This isn't a bass. Sacrilege, is a guitar. I'm going to show you as if this was a bas, but yes, this is indeed a guitar, but it works in the exact same way. So you will take your quarter inch cable and plug it into your bass or your guitar. And you could if you wanted to, maybe you would have your bass going to a base amp, and then you would have a microphone pointed towards the amp to record the sound of the amp. That's another totally valid way of doing things, and that would work in the same way. You would just be having a mic input instead of a direct in quarter inch cable base input. I tend to find for bass. I prefer the quarter inch direct to the audio interface because whatever cool sound I'm getting from an amp, I can usually recreate in Ableton, and when it's direct in, I tend to have more control, and I like a clean sounding low end. So the amp thing is more of something I'll do for a guitar. For bass, I basically always go direct in. So now you want to make sure that your correct input is selected. I have the bass plugged into the second input. So notice how there's nothing coming in on one. There is sound coming in on two. That's exactly correct. Let's select number two. We can go to in monitoring, we can turn this on, and you'll want to tune your base. Once it's tuned, you can create the loop that you want to create here. Make sure that you're on in monitoring, check your sample size to make sure that you won't have any latency. So we're 256, which is a low latency, which is good for recording, and we're going to hit record. So then we will comp our take. So let's go ahead, turn loop mode on for our drums. Extend out the drums to maybe an eight bar loop, and we're going to go ahead and grab this section and pull it to the end of the eight bar loop. I'm turning it back to off, turning ad off, and bring this all the way back. And you can see that what we were playing was a bar loop because this is the turnaround, which is happening at the end over here. So as happens sometimes when you're recording, these beats aren't lining up. So it helps if you know where your strong beats were. This is the downbeat. So our section is actually more like this. Which is the end of the 8 bars. Now if we cut here, this is the 4 bars. And what I like to do is I like to line up the takes underneath themselves so that I can get a clean understanding of what I did when. So if you copy this take here and paste and you click the line right at the end and hit paste and drag it to the left, you're always going to know that you're perfectly in time because we recorded it in this loop. So obviously, I had several different parts that I was auditioning. And let's say we can cut the rest of this. Let's say we know that we just like the last, take the best. I can loop here and audition these two. And listen to this one. And let's say we like the second half of this take and the first half of that take. We can do several different things. But the cleanest way to do it is command T, create a new audio track and call this CP, and we'll cut here and we'll take the first part of the first take, and the second part of the second take to create our comp take, which is the best of both worlds. Then we remember that this was a little off time, so you would want to cut this and maybe move that over to be more on the beat. Because originally, it was like this. It's a little late. So what we did, we cut it and we moved it right here, and I know that this de is supposed to be on the beat, and this is a little pickup that comes before. Sometimes with live recordings, you want to get rid of the space that's not actually having any musical value in case there was some moving around or some room noise that you didn't want, or sometimes you do want this sound. So that's a subjective choice that's up to you. And here is our Ct take. The only thing is I didn't like this last note. I wanted that to be a little bit lower in pitch. So let's go over to this pitch, and we'll go to the right knob which changes pitch even subtler and go maybe -50. There we go. This is what I wanted. And now maybe this is just not perfectly in time. So I know, again, this is a pick up done De De. And it seems to be this note that's out of time. So what we can do here, we can do several different things. But one thing we can do is open up our note editor, and click and create a Warpoint here because we don't want to change this first note. Click and create a Warpoint here because we don't want to change the second note. Click and create a Warpoint here because we do want to change this note. We can zoom in, and we can move this to exactly where we want this note to start. And that sounds good to me. And since this was actually a guitar and we're just pretending that it's a bass, you could try pitching this down an octave. That's how you would go about recording live bass. So anytime you get a chance, I would say, go for it. Record some live bass on every song, kidding, whenever it's appropriate, but I really love the that a live bass has. 17. Compress Your Bass: Tighten and Control: Let's learn about base compression. So as with everything else in life, we want to compress it. So let's go through and do some basic base compression here. We're going to listen to this bass sound. We want to turn it up so that we hear, but we definitely don't want it to be distorting. And again, this is way louder than I actually have the base in the song. But what we're focusing on in this lesson is the compression. So, I love this R compa has an amazing bass guitar preset, which you can really pull the threstle down a lot, and you can get a lot of compression on your base, especially because you want the drums to kind of melt well with your basse and if your basses is really compressed, and the drums are kind of a little bit more dynamic, that can be exactly the separation that you want. But let's say you just want to use some of Ableton's stock compressors. You can also get an amazing sound using Ableton' stock compressor. So let's go here, dynamics, pull up the compressor. And it's nice to keep this four to one ratio. It's nice to have a sort of slow tack and kind of a quick release here. And let's listen to what this sounds like. And you can play with how much of the attack you want. I like when the first part of the base cuts through, but maybe if you have a more of electronic sound, you would want this attack to be closer to the left so that less of the pluck or first parts cutting through. And how long do you want to hold on to the end? I don't want to choke my bass part, but I do want to compress it kind of a lot. Let's say you had a different sound here. How would you want to compress this synth base? Here is really apparent, how much of that first part is clipping through. That's just up to you, what you think sounds good. Let's say you had more of an electronic part here. Sometimes with the AO weights, it's tricky because you never ever, ever want to compress subbase. You always want your subbase to be uncompressed. So sometimes with the Ato weights, you do want to compress them, but it kills the low end, the sub part of the eight A eight, because the only time you don't have a subbase is when you use an AA eight, because an Ato weight is kind of also a subbase. So Because of that, what you could do is duplicate your sub, duplicate your eight oh eight, I mean, and eQ them differently so that maybe this eight oh eight here will be everything above 100 hertz. We'll just move this to 100. And then maybe this eight oh eight here will be everything below 100, and maybe we won't compress this low one, and we will compress this high one. Or maybe you can get away with compressing it as a whole. But you definitely want to compress your base, and you want to pull down the threshold usually a lot. You don't want to suffocate the base, but you want the other elements of your song to cut through. And the base is really there to feel powerful, which the compression helps, and there to support your song, which the compression also helps. The simpler your song with the less elements, the less compressed everything can be. But if you have a regular kind of you know, regular busy ish song. You definitely probably want to compress your base. Obviously, it's really impossible to give wide advice on compression or mixing like this, but I find that I usually do end up compressing my base a decent amount to really let the other elements shine through. Again, every song is unique, and you will always find an example where it just doesn't sound good to compress your base in the way that I've been showing you. And that's totally fine. Always trust your ears, always trust your instinct. But base can handle a lot of compression. And that's the main takeaway I want you to have after watching this lesson. 18. EQ Your Bass: Sculpt the Perfect Low End: This lesson is all about base EQ. So we talked about possibly high passing your base leaving room for your sub, which is a move you might want to consider. You also might want to consider low passing your sub at 100 hertz, so you don't have any high frequencies fighting the rest of your base. It's something you may want to consider. A high end boost on your base can sometimes help it cut through. So you don't always want to focus on the lows. Sometimes you want to focus on the high end, the high part of your sound. You can always boost the lows if it's not basic enough, and you can also use EQ as a sound design tool to change the sound that you're working with. So let's go to our base here. Pull up the C Q. And boot him Hyatt. Here's this. This mid range is nice on this base. You really hear the sound of the fingers on the base, which might be what you want, or might not. This is just an example of a cool range on your base that's the low end, this is not base. Here's the high end. Let's see if boosting this helps to cut through the mix. See Again, this is way louder than I would have it, and we're distorting now. So if you did want to do a big bold Q move, which I clearly didn't choose to do for this song, you would then want to pull down the general volume to offset our peaking problem here. We'll go over distortion next because distortion is another way of adding high end or letting your base cut through. And that is the route I chose to go with this song. So let's go over here to this example, and we're going to pull up an EQ, and we'll see what we can do here. So, do we want to boost the high end at all? I think boosting the high end is kind of nice, but it's making it really apparent that I played this live and did not quantize it. You can really hear how these are not perfectly on the beat. And it's interesting how the high end, when it's cutting through more is making that so obvious. So we can go ahead and select all of these and try to do a global p. Normally, I would want to keep some of the live, but just to show you this, that was a quick fix here. Oops. But when you do a quick quantize and you don't listen to everything, sometimes you run into unexpected problems, which is what we just heard there. So, this is a pretty extreme move. I may want to just find what is the specific place I like here. Little bit that's nice. And a little bit, that's nice. If I had a sub, I would maybe want to highpass this and let the sub cut through here. If I wanted it to be base here, I could add some I could change this to a bell curve here and add some base. This has the more thicker base quality to it when we boost the lows. So you don't have to EQ your base at all. If you wanted to cut through a little more, try the high end. If you want it to feel more powerful and feel thicker, try the low end. And if you have a sub, I would consider just trying to high pass just to see if that makes your song sound better or not. And if you have an electronic sound, you can try to use E Q as a sound design tool. Let's go to this example. So this is a pretty big sound. Let's go and change this two into a low pass. Now, we're changing the sound to be a different sound entirely. So, this might be more of the vibe you want. And although all we're doing is getting rid of this high end, it's changing the sound enough that it sounds like an entirely new sound to me. You could try boosting different parts. Having this more. If you don't have a specific vision in mind and you do a move like this, and it sounds pretty good. I would usually just leave it there. Like, sound design can be an endless rabbit hole. And if you have the time and you're setting time aside, I'm just going to mess around with some sound design now. There's no goal in mind, no pressure. We'll just see how it goes, mess around with some EQs, totally go for it. But for me, over the years, when I first started producing, I was 100% only interested in sound design. I wanted to find the perfect sound every time. As I've been producing longer and longer and longer, I find a sound that's pretty close, and I will get the part dial. The actual music of what it's playing has become more and more important to me. And then I will go on to work on a different part of the song. And if only when I am done with the song as a whole, will I come back and see, Oh, was that the coolest sound? Could I find a better sound? That's the time for me when I really go back into sound design. So I used to be very sound design first. Now I'm sound design at a little later stage in the process, and there's no right or wrong answer. I follow my inspiration. I encourage you to do the same. And You can use EQs for all of these different ways, and I just want you to know all the tools that are available for you. 19. Distort Your Bass: Add Character and Grit: L et's explore some base distortion. Distortion is a really important part of base. Distortion is a way that you can help your base cut through without adding in the EQ because sometimes you're boosting the high end, but unless you really boost the high end a ton, it's just not actually cutting through in a meaningful way. And it's unclear if you want to be queuing it that much. So this is where distortion comes in. We have a lot of great distortion here in Ableton, and you can go over to our audio effects and go to Color and Drive, and these are all different distortions. The saturator is particularly a good one for base. A bit warmer and warm up lows are some of my go toes that I use often. There's no distortion. Turn this up so you can hear it. Here's with the distortion. C. Yes, to those who are super picky. We are adding the digital distortion here that is affecting the way it sounds. Yes, that's true. But what I wanted you to focus on was the difference in quality of the sound when these were off and when these were on. And because these were subtle. This was not a huge L, I wasn't turning this into a huge, like EDM distorted base all of a sudden. We weren't distorting it that much. We were just adding a little bit of subtle distortion, which was helping the base cut through a little bit more. So I use the Ableton saturator here, and I use this Ozone vintage tape module. So it's okay, if you don't have this, it's not necessary. I like how this sounds, but what this is doing is emulating a saturator, which we already have here in Ableton. I did end up using both. You could pump the Ableton saturator a little bit more or layer some Ableton saturators on themselves. Hey. And I think that actually sounds really good. So here we're doing the warm up highs. So we are distorting a little bit of those high end to help us hear our base more. And for some reason, base just loves some subtle distortion. I almost always put some subtle distortion on the base. It's just like it really sounds good, especially for these acoustic base sounds. When you go more into the synth base route, I generally do still use the saturators and the different distortions. But it depends because sometimes they cut through enough already. And so, you're not actually trying to cut them up, but maybe you do want to warm them up because maybe the scent sounds a little bit cold. And you just experiment with whatever you're working on in your music. But distortion should definitely be part of the equation for basse. Whether you're using distortion a lot to sort of change the sound of the base. Like with, like, an amp distortion. This we're using distortion very much as sound design. We're completely transforming the sound that we're using, so distortion can be that powerful, but it can also be subtle. And if you like the sound that you have, I encourage you to just try a little bit of subtle saturation on there and see if it makes it sound just a little bit better. You'll see that music production really does come down to making things sound a little bit better a of the time. So all these different steps along the way. We're just going to do a little bit of distortion, which makes it sound that much better. We'll do a little bit of EQ, makes it sound that much better, a little bit of compression, makes it like gel with the rest of the song, just that much. And then in the end, we have a finished song that sounds great. So not every move that you make needs to be a huge game changing, song changing moment. It's not like adding some subtle distortion to your base. It is suddenly going to change your whole song. It's just a little move that sounds good, combined with a lot of other little moves that sound good that come to this big picture that really sounds great. 20. No Reverb on Bass: Lesson is about not putting reverb on your base. Of course. There are no rules, and I encourage you to break every suggestion that I give you. For the most part, you don't want to put reverb on your base. So let's just listen to our base. And like, Okay, in solo, sure, that does sound kind of cool. Maybe you want a little bit of the hep. So for the purposes of this lesson, I'm going to go ahead and turn this base way louder just so we can really focus on the base. C. Here's the reverb. Day. I mean, it's not the worst thing that I've ever heard. You can get away with some reverbon base. The no reverb on base is a good thing to remember, but you don't need to live by it. Sure. Maybe you want a little bit of reverb on this base. That's fine. But for the most part, you want to keep your kick drum and your base without reverb on it so that it's really clean and your low end doesn't sound muddy. You never ever want reverb on your subbase. See what that sounds like? Here's without the re verb. So sounds way cleaner. Different genres are more picky about the low end being super clean. A clean low end does have a very professional feel. But honestly, every trend that happens when a certain sound is the sound of the moment, the next up and coming trend is usually a complete 180 reaction to that. So Now that I'm telling you not to put reverb on your base, I'm sure we'll see some huge genre that blows up, which is all about messy low ends, that have a lot of reverb. And you can at least start identifying what it sounds like. If you do feel compelled to use some reverb on your base, use some reverb on your kick drum or your low end, just use it very sparingly at first and keep checking in with yourself if it's really adding to the song or not because there's a very big difference between how this sounds alone. And how this sounds in a whole track. Now, if you built a whole beat around this that was very open and sparse, sure. And a lot of your favorite synth precepts will have a little tiny bit of reverb, just a little bit of reverb on for your synth bases. So a little tiny bit of reverb goes a long way on your base. If you really want reverb and you want to push it, but you don't want to compromise the low end, a strategy could be to duplicate a track, and what I did there is I clicked on this and you can hit Apple or Windows D. I'll duplicate the track, and you could send the high end to the re, keep the low end away from the re, pull an EQ. And like we've done before split these two channels. So you could have this be a high pass here, and we'll just call it at 100, and then this can be below 100, or maybe for this specific example, you want to do like 250. And then this could be maybe 250 as well, sort of kind of a random number. But at least you'll have this clean low end and this reverb low end. I still think that's too much reverb. So if this was a song I was working, I would pull it down. So the reason why we did this is to keep the low end clean. And that's why I urge you to think of the no reverb on base slogan. As you can see, in this lesson, we did put some reverb on base, and that's totally okay. I just want you to understand that a clean low end will be very, so you can have that be a low priority. Maybe a lean, really punchy, dancy low end is not a high priority for you. And that's okay. Whatever you're working on, just remember that if you have reverb on your low end, it's for sure going to not sound very clear, and I don't recommend it. So if you do want the sound of reverb on your base, I do recommend splitting your base into two channels, putting reverb on the top part, so you can still keep your low end clean. 21. Learn from the Masters: Study Iconic Bass Parts: Now it's time to learn from the masters. Just like with drums or with any other aspect of music, if you want to learn how to write amazing baselines, then I encourage you to listen to amazing basselines. Go ahead and listen to the basselines of your favorite songs and then either recreate them or at least play them on the keyboard or something or hum them or understand the and recreating is really the best thing you can do to vis really understand what it is that your favorite baselines are doing. Let's say you're listening to Phoebe Bridges, who isn't really, like a base heavy artist. And the baselines are usually not very featured in the storytelling of her song, but just listen to what the base part is because there is base there, and it is doing something. Even if it's just a supporting role and you want to write that kind of music, it's important to understand what are your favorite artists doing? Or maybe you want to make music like Fred again, who is a lot more base heavy than you can understand and recreate those kinds of techniques. So I highly recommend that you make a playlist of your favorite artists and listen to the baselines exclusively. And if you have the time to go ahead and recreate those beats specifically to recreating those baselines, 22. Finding Bass in Ableton: Unlock Your Resources: Lesson is about recapping where your base sounds live in Ableton. You might have a third party plug in. That plug in would live in your plug ins folder, you would then open it, and you would pull that plug in into a midi track, and that would be maybe where your base sounds live. You might have some samples, and your samples would live in a samples folder. You would then find the sample that you wanted to use, and you would drag that into Ableton. You could drag it straight up like this, or you could drag it to a drum rack. Now, if you are just wanting to use Ableton's native sounds, you have the instruments tab, and you have all of the synths can be played in that base region, and all of them will even have base presets. So, these base presets are a great place to start when you're making a beat, and you just want to quickly get some inspiration, some ideas on the table. I highly recommend starting with these base presets. You can also look for Ableton samples and find some base samples here, which you could drag into the timeline. And you can make a base part like this, cutting your part, duplicating it, and writing a base part like so, and taking the time to find what a cool part would sound like. Could maybe have a hit more often. Maybe these second hits will be a different note. Or you could go about creating a drum rack, dragging that into a new midi track, and then finding a sample that you want to use. Or you could create a sampler and drag that into a midi track, and then go back to your samples and down your sample into the sampler. And then you could go ahead and create a mid clip and draw your part in on the piano roll. There is no right or wrong way to make a baseline. And all of these ways can be combined together so that you can find something that's truly unique for your song. I love bass, and it's so much fun seeing how and rhythm and power you can get from finding the right baseline. 23. Third Party Plugins Showcase: Used some third party plug ins in this chapter, and I want to go over each of those with you now. So, trillion here by Specter Sonics is an amazing bass module. It sounds like this. And you just basically click on whatever category you want. You can do the general category. It has synth bases. It has a whole lot of different options, acoustic bases. I use it mainly for its acoustic based sounds, but it does have some amazing synth sounds. And look at all these acoustic bass sounds. There is honestly, so many that I haven't even tried them all, and they sound amazing. So this is a great, great preset. The best I have ever found for a electric base, live, acoustic base synth. And this is really my top recommendation if you're going for an electric based sound, and you don't have a real base. I think that trillion truly did such an amazing job. We also used serum. Now, Serum is probably the most popular synth right now. It's a synth that has a lot of people that make great sounding presets for, which is great. It's also super customizable. You can make any sound you can think of. It goes pretty deep. It's an entire world of its own to learn. But luckily, there's a lot of really super talented producers out there that make great sounding presets. And a lot of them live on splice, and we'll talk about that in a later lesson. And you can just get like, these amazing custom sounds that people have spent a lot of time doing. And when I started producing, I would make all my sounds from scratch. As I've gone on, I've really seen how Starting from a preset that's in the general direction of where I want to go is just a huge time saver. And I really respect the work that a lot of people are putting into making presets these days. That being said, you can make your own custom amazing sounds with Serum. And I highly recommend you get serum if you make electronic music. We also have play. Play is part of the Composer cloud, and I love the Composer Cloud. It is a kind of expensive subscription, and is mostly intended for composers working on films and videos, but they have the best orchestral sounds that I've come across. And I just love all of these different orchestral sounds that they have. They have beyond just orchestral They have a lot of different acoustic instruments from all over the world and different styles, jazz, rock, blues. And they really have a huge variety of acoustic sounds, as well as some amazing electronic sounds. What I use this for the most is really its orchestral sounds. And I love having some high quality flutes and strings, woodwinds, brass, voices, choirs. This is my go to when that's what I'm looking for. There are, of course other resources to get all these sounds. But I really, really love play in the composer cloud, and that's my G two for orchestral sounds. Omnisphere is another incredible synth. And Onnes sphere is also made by Spectra sonic, same company's Trillion, and you can even load your trillion library into Omnisphere. Trillion excluded. Omnisphere has its own incredible bass sounds. It's not really my G two for base, although they do have some amazing sounds, I mostly go for pads or other synth sounds, leads, keys, other synth like higher register sounds with Omnisphere, but they do have some amazing bases as well. Keyscape is another synth by Specter Sonics, and it is incredible piano sounds. They are the best piano sounds that I've heard, and they have a wide variety of different styles to choose from from epic cinematic classical sounding pianos to really custom broken down honky tonk sounding pianos and everything in between. Nexus is a preset bank. It is very customizable, but not 100% customizable. I used to use Nexus all the time. I use it less and less and less these days, but it still has some incredible presets. And it's amazing for when it has the exact right sound that you're looking for. It's not that searchable, which is my biggest complaint with Nexus. There's no search bar, so you can't just type in and find the preset that you're looking for, unless maybe somehow that does exist, and it's just escaping me. But I have not been able to find that. So I use Nexus less and less, but it does have some incredible presets that just sound great, and I used to use it all the time because depending on the genre that you're producing in, you might find all of the sounds you need right here in Nexus. We've been also using the R comp. Now, the R comp is the Renaissance compressor from Waves. It is my favorite compressor. I use it all the time. I use it frequently on many different instruments and samples within a song, and I highly recommend that you get the R comp if you are serious about producing. The P Q is by FabFilter Pro Q three, and it's my favorite EQ. I really love how the sound of it. It's very transparent, it's very powerful. I like seeing the waves here. There's lots of different functionality that you can use. And it is my favorite EQ that I really recommend to all series producers. Valhalla Vintage reverb is my favorite reverb plug in. It's very affordable. It sounds great. They have great precess to choose from. And I just love how Honestly, the default pats just sound so good. And I really recommend Valhalla, if you want to step up your reverb game. Ozone tape is part of the Ozone nine or ten series, and it's an amazing sounding tape distortion. I don't know if I would just buy the Ozone tape alone separate from the rest of the bundle, but I do use the whole Ozone suite, especially for mastering. Because I have it, I end up using this on base all the time. So I do recommend this plug in. It sounds amazing. If you're interested in buying this from Ozone, I would maybe recommend checking out the entire mastering bundle, because it comes with a whole series of amazing plug ins, as well as the mastering suite, which just sounds good if you're interested in mastering your music. Saturn by FabFilter, the same company that makes the Pro Q three is one of my favorite distortions. It's more serious distortion than the subtle tape distortion, subtle emulation from the ozone. It is really, really some serious distortion. Of course, you can always turn back the dry wet and have it be affecting your sound just a minimally. But it sounds really, really good to my ear, and I often go to the saturn when I'm looking for distortion. Is an endless world of plug ins out there. And I'm not suggesting that you need to go ahead and buy a bunch of plug ins right now. I'm just putting on your radar some of my favorite plug ins. So as you continue down your road as a music maker, that you can slowly start to see, Okay, let's say you make Indie rock, and you really like how everything you do sounds, but you could use just a slightly better sounding acoustic bass right off the bat, where you don't have to EQ it as much, and you don't have to distort it as Much because the original sound just sounds just that much better. Go ahead and buy trillion or at least try it. I just want you to have all of these different plug ins on your radar. So when the time comes, if that time ever comes, that you decide you maybe want to invest in some plug ins, that you can at least know what my go toes are. 24. Congratulations!: Congratulations on finishing this class. I am so proud of you, and I can't wait to listen to your class project. You can say hi to me on Instagram or Spotify at Benza Maman. And if you like this class, please check out my other music classes on Skillshare.