One of the most popular questions I am asked on my YouTube page is how do I create these super groovy Tech House basslines in my tutorials. So I decided to finally reveal my lightning fast technique to all of you in this quick tutorial. After watching this video you will soon realise how super quick, easy and effective my technique is!

Transcript

So it’s time to address a question that I get a lot on the youtube channel which is how do you make your bass lines in the tech house and techno tracks that you’ll demo in. Now the answer to this is mind-blowingly simple. So much so that I don’t anticipate this tutorial will run for probably more than five minutes. So grab your stopwatch let’s get cracking with this and I’m gonna play you the little loop that we’re starting with before we get the bass line going. And I always start with something like this. It’s a basic backdrop and it just sets the tone for me to build the bass line underneath it. So kick, off beat, hi-hat and an atmosphere. Have a listen.

So, nice little feature in here is just a tiny bit of a reverse of the hat that I’ve put in to help the couple of bars loop over big banging kick techno kick. And then there’s this atmosphere in the background. I’ll just turn it up so you can hear. It’s down minus 41 DB so that’s how low I’ve got it in the in the loop.

So that’s just EQ’d, sidechained and it’s just sitting there. It helps to glue all of the sounds together and kind of create that feel that I want for a techno tune. So let’s get stuck in with building the actual bass line. This is mega mega simple. Here’s what I do, I grab three different samples, they can be single one hit, one shot type samples or they can be loops and then I drag them in and I build my bass line in audio. Now you might choose to have more samples, you might choose just to have a couple. I do recommend having a couple though because that’s where the contrast comes from, in these bass lines. And I’m gonna pick three and I’m gonna go for kind of suby, weighty feeling bases and then one that’s maybe sure to punch here. Perhaps one that’s got some character. Something like that to add that extra bit of contrast. That’s okay. Perhaps, there you go. Let’s go with that one. That’ll do that can sit up here somewhere the other one was a bit too kick drumy which is fine. I just don’t fancy that this time round. Okay this one’s pretty cool. There we go something like that. So that’ll be a top one and I’m actually gonna vacate this pack there’s a lot of stuff that’s sounding very very similar and let’s try something from here another kind of weighty, bass that’ll do.

Okay. Brilliant. So let’s loop it up over a bar and we’ll literally add these things in one at a time. So I’m going to come in, cut out all the stuff that I don’t want. Let’s get rid of all of this. I think we just have this on the offbeat. It’s perhaps gonna be a bit too huge. So I’m gonna just come in and we’ll change this up a little bit. And let’s have a listen. Too loud. Let’s bring this one in in fact I think we’re just going to keep this on the other offbeat. Let’s move that across. Quite predictable but actually sounds good so I’m gonna leave it be. And then we’ve got this interesting character style bass that’s gonna sit on the top. Just get rid of all of that and try and figure out where we’re gonna put this. This is probably gonna need a bit of EQ so it’s not conflicting with the other bass but I just want to give you an idea of how this works. Let’s be honest we could probably leave it there right. That’s already sounding quite nice. That’s syncopated feel. Let’s try adding maybe we’ll leave it like that. And let’s just go ahead and we’ll take you make use of the whole two bars we’ve got. And let’s maybe another one in the end here somewhere. 

And there you go that is literally all I do and that works super well. Now of course you might find that if you’re going to have melodies and you’re gonna have chords and things you might want to pitch these to be in the same key, you might want to stick a bit a delay on that top one. Experiment with it. You filter out the low end and just have that kind of interesting character that that one’s bringing to the table. And I did a few other ones as well. Just you can get a feel for it. So here’s another one, completely different samples on this one. Again sort of techno type feel to it. Just turn those on. And we’ll bring this little stabbing.

So similar feel to the one we just did actually. And then here’s one that’s more of a kind of house type vibe to it. So slightly different you can see the patterns very different that I’ve put the heat seen on sliced up this particular loop so it’s a little bit different. We’ve just got the beginning of some of the samples here as well you can slice out little pieces. So this is going to have a very different vibe to it. And that is it super super simple. So I say a lot creativity loves speed for me this technique never fails to produce awesome bass lines. You can use it for tech house, techno, prog house, deep house you name it you can get some really really good stuff out of this one. There’s a lot of contrast in it. It bounces, there’s a different timbres that really bring it to life. So one of my favorite techniques for sure. As I mentioned you might want to get everything in key if you’re gonna have some nice kind of pads and a riffing there potentially. But other than that you are absolutely good to go. 

So enjoy. Have fun with it. Happy music making and I’ll speak to you next time.

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)