Creating a solid sub bass line in your track provides the core foundation for making listeners dance and groove away to your music. Finding the right sounds and adding the correct processing to make them cut through a mix can often be a struggle and time consuming for producers. So I decided to create a short tutorial and show you a really cool way to create groovy, professional-sounding sub-bass lines easily. This technique is so quick and effective, it almost feels like cheating! Check it out!

Transcript

Okay, so I had a lot of interest in my last tech-house baseline tutorial. So, I’ve made a follow up for you and in this one, I’m gonna show you a super-fast trick that I used to create awesome deep subby baselines.

So if you make deep house Romanian house minimal house even something like minimal techno basically anything with really deep sub bass lines in it you’re absolutely gonna love this trick so I’m going to give you the recipe from start to finish.

We’re gonna be sampling from other tracks, so the first thing you’re gonna want to do is listen out for tunes that you love the bassline and it’s really deep we’re talking proper sub bass here. So here’s an example of a track that I like. So you can hear it’s got a really deep bass line in there not a lot of frequencies going on in the mid-range of that bass.

Step two you need to find an area of the track that’s quite stripped back so this is the intro but maybe it’d be the outro or perhaps it’s gonna be a breakdown but you want to find an area where there’s not an absolute ton of stuff going on and from there you’ll very simply apply a filter so we’re going to take out the top end. So you can hear I’ve mainly just got the real subby stuff in here now then a sidechain compressor that’s gonna come from your kick drum and we’re ready to go.

Step two, slice up the hits, in fact, that step three isn’t it. First one was, find it. Second one, was the filtering and the sidechain now we’re going to go in and we’re going to slice this up so I’m literally just looking visually and using command E I’m gonna slice wherever I think a hit starts and finishes and no need to be a nor about this literally just go in and visually do what you think is right. Let’s go there maybe for that one and I’m gonna include the kick drums in this and then it is simply a job of rearranging this now you’re gonna want to rearrange it with some other drums playing and I’ve got a kick of tops loop a vinyl layer going on there and a little hack for you I like to duplicate this out and then on this lower track I’m literally just gonna come in and start grabbing bits and plonking them in wherever I see fit, so at the moment we just got my own bassline that I’m mixing up and messing about with here and that is going to be playing with my kicks tops loop and vinyl layer so let’s have a look, lets bring maybe this thing in here somewhere, put that there, let’s see what we got so far. Sounding pretty good, duplicate, let’s fill out this space with something interesting why don’t we grab the kick drum from the beginning and see what happens if we put that in here no idea let’s have a listen, happy with that. Let’s do another one, kind of feels a bit like cheating. Let’s bring that one in here this time let’s have the kick drum in… maybe we’re going to put that in there we’ll take the end off of it let’s get these cool bits, this one can go in maybe here, whatever this is can go in here, sort of listen cool like that bit at the end. So let’s maybe do something interest in here let’s get rid of this maybe this time and we’ll swap it out so pop that one him gonna have to shorten it first and it goes and here we go and there you have it how quick is that.

So I got a few other tips for you on this as well you can get really great results sampling from different records and combining the lowends, lots of variety to be had there also sampling from different genres whether it’s funk records Drum & Bass hip hop anything is fair game to give you some really nice textures for your low-end and then finally consider layering a mid-range bass perhaps just on the accents that you like to really make the bassline pop out.  

So that’s it, I hope you enjoyed the tutorial if you want more tips like this I’ve chucked a link underneath the video for you you can grab yourself a copy of the free finish more music 101 tips for house and techno producers ebook I’ve also included in that a bunch of my favorites sample packs and software for you to check out, so I hope you enjoyed the tutorial take care until next time happy music-making.

Thank you for watching

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Let me know how you get on with the techniques I showed in the videos and if you have any suggestions for future tutorials, ping me a message on Instagram (@IamKeithMills)