Ableton Forum

I very interested in how bass is made in music. Are there different styles of bass e.g. mid bass sub bass ect are they all used together? or do some songs just use one bass sound throughout their song? I'm trying to analyse songs but the main lows I hear is the kick is that because bass is usually also very high in the mid range?

Thanks for the reply's in advance

David

Sea Bass

It's all your preference and the song.

Some songs you use multiple basses, some you use 1 or 2.

I usually like to make 2 in different patterns, and make multiple kinds of bass in instrument rack.

Also you can EQ the highs and lows and mids to make different sounds when you layer it.

one of the best is a pure sine wave - if you play it low - just sounds of bass!

I used to just use the sine wave off my old akai s1000.

Back in the day.

I mostly make techno/techno-inspired stuff so usually a bassline for me is just a sine, a heavily filtered square or saw, or a "kick bass" (kick drum with the attack removed and some filtering).

Producers of other styles like electro-house, brostep and DnB do all sorts of stuff to basslines - layers, split-band processing, etc. Just depends on what fits with the song and style.

i love it when producers use multiple basslines, all operating within different frequency ranges - also love decent dubstep djing when a couple of fairly busy drops are mixed together to create a boneshaking wall of polyrhythmic bass frequencies.
so that's what I do. sometimes.
low frequency sine waves always seem to work on big speakers.

And of course there is the mini moog.

Stands out a bit more and is a sound in itself rather than sitting underneath the mix.