Have you ever noticed that professional sounding tracks always feel like their low end is rich, warm and sounds fat on any system? Well there are a few insider tips and tricks that can achieve this in any one of your tracks. Check out this week’s video where I show you some simple, but extremely effective techniques that can help fatten up your bass so it sounds great on everything from cheap iPhone earbuds to full club sound systems. If you’re a bass head like me, you will want to check it out!
Transcript
Okay so if we were playing a G for example, we can then come in and I’m going to use operator for this because it’s a fantastic tool. If you come into the oscillator section, you can select this number 16 is the one that you’ll need for bass and you can start drawing harmonics in, and that’s immediately gonna make this start to sound richer. Now I could widen just those upper harmonics, use a tool just to widen those that would make it fat and keep the bottom in mono as well. So if you have just the sine wave like or whatever the main base let’s call it, if you have that in mono but then you add A and other thing underneath it that is wide which is normally if you listen to techno, what’s going on underneath the kick drum can be sort of 30 to 40 decibels lower in volume than the kick and the bass, and that is the wide thing. So it’s very very low and if it goes into a club and it gets some dim, some to mono it doesn’t matter because the main base is still banging as hell. But if you listen to it on a system where it is wide, you get that extra kind of almost psycho acoustic kind of vibe to it, but that being said there are plenty of basses now that are appearing that are in live in stereo. As long as it collapses to mono, you’ll be okay. And I often talk about my favorite tool for that which is BX Stereo Maker. Let me just start go in here and show you guys this tool as well. This kitty here, if you want to make stuff wide, this is the one to go for. It would take a mono signal and it will widen it so in this particular instance, I could take this bass sound and I can widen it, and I can come in and then I can mono the lower section, and that way, I end up with part of it wide and part of it in mono. And the best thing about this tool is it sums 100% perfectly every time to mono. So if it gets, if anybody needs to do it, if it gets some the low end in a club, that is going to resolve it immediately so that is a secret, was not a secret weapon I always tell you guys about it but it is super super cool and well worth getting. So let me just go back to this base. So straight away by adding these upper harmonics, I’ve made this sound richer and bigger and warmer you could be using a saw wave and just filtering it down for example and EQ in it to get the the vibe that you want. If you want to fatten this up you can add a second oscillator to this and octave down and the typical shake that we use for this is the triangle and this will fatten it up.
You don’t want to overcook it but you can see those extra harmonics that are being added in. And these will again really start to fatten the bass up. You’re not gonna want this hump at the bottom that’s just been introduced that’s an octave lower so make sure you eq that out. If I just put this in front of the spectrum so we can see what we doing, no unfortunately that one is not a freebie. There you go, and that is going to give you a much much fatter base than if we come in here and let’s just for comparison sake go onto the first one, take that oscillator off, take those additional harmonics out, and…
One, two, you can hear straight away that it’s getting much richer. So that’s without me yet there’s no widening on that one, but that’s thickening it up with an additional oscillator. It’s adding harmonics above it. There is another tool that I haven’t tried yet which is again by the Brainworks guys. It’s called subfilter or something like that and a lot of people swear by it. They have a free version of that so if you guys want to try that out, that again does some clever kind of boosting and psycho acoustic effects to fatten up a bassline because a lot of it is to do with what you’re hearing above the bass that is making your brain create the information below the bass. It sounds a bit weird but that is part of the kind of magic that is going on so you’ve got additional harmonics and again in fact let me just dive back two seconds, the other things that you can use with this Cris which I didn’t mention here and I’ve turned this into a little little rack just the other day. Matt Bush put me on to this. I really like these plugins so I made a bottle three of them and turned them into a rack I strongly recommend that you do this. If you’ve got colouration plugins that you like and you use Ableton, and if you don’t use Ableton you can always keymap the on/off button of different plugins which is another way of doing it. So I like to have a number of processors that are already set up so I can dial each one into sound decent and then I can flick between them to see which one is actually sounding the best. So that is something that I would recommend doing as well on your efforts to fatten up anything in your track, get a number of different processes. I like these ones from Kershaw . They sound good and I’m a big fan of stuff that’s got one big dial in the middle of it and there’s very little for me to do other than tweak that. Don’t like much work when it comes to this stage. So yeah, that’s the sort of rack that you can add and that’s also gonna add various different harmonics noise, grit, bite, saturation, bit reduction, whatever you choose to throw in there, that’s going to fatten up your bass.
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