Grime n Hip Hop Producer, need some tips on baselines.

B

Black_d

New member
I make grime beats n also hip hop beats. Theres things that u lot might find simple but still cant figure it out myself.

On a standard hip hop tune u have the standard baseline. Say "DMX - Untouchable" for example, every time i try 2 use a baseline to back my tune it always sounds flat or/and out of tune, how can i get them gud acurate base sounds? I use reason, fruity n cubase but reason mainly for drumloops. I know that the bases can be made on reason but find i it tricky 2 get 1 that fits. shud i use a base patch n wat base patches wud giv good results that come wid reason? etc...
 
There are a couple things you can try out if your bass isn't matching well with the drums. First you can try tuning your drums. Mainly raising or lowering the pitch of the kick. If you are having a problem with the notes you can try this. Alot of the time I have a hard time recognizing the notes while playing bass so I will raise the bass up a couple octaves so I can hear the notes better. When I find the notes that I want to play I lower it back down. I create my own bass sounds with subtractor and use a few of the presets as well. The presets I find myself using most are L.A. Riot and Hyperbottom. I will usually end up tweaking those presets as well. Adjusting the filters usually but sometimes they work well as is.
 
Ok here is a basic wow type bass patch I did really quick. Might not be the exact sound you are looking for but mess around with the different waveforms, filters and lfo settings. That's how I basically learned how to create sounds in subtractor. I just messed around with all of the settings until I understood exactly what they were doing.
 
Just for the record, don't worry if you have trouble coming up with good basslines - in my opinion, coming up with the right bassline is the most difficult part of making this style of music......

Sometimes you will run into some problems with overlapping frequencies when you add in a kick drum. The low end will sound really muddy if this is happening. To solve this problem, run your bass line through a parametric EQ and cut the extreme low end.

If you just can't get your bass sounding thick enough, try taking a simple bass line and running the audio signal through a Spider so that you can split it up into multiple sources. I do this quite frequently with really simple bass patterns. I generally split it into three sources - I add a splash of reverb on one source, perhaps a slightly detuned chorus on another, and then run one dry. I will put these three sources back into a mixer and then tune the levels so that it sounds thick and 'on tune'......

Another thing to try is to run a bass pattern into a Maelstrom - the Maelstrom takes audio-in and you can connect an audio source directly into the Shaper. The 'Quant' algorithm can do some very interesting things to a bass line - from there, play with the filter and see what you come up with.
 
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yeah live bass rules !! but its not always available if ur not a bass player :-(

just a thought, but, could the problem be anything to do with the rythm ? I mean, does the kick drum sit well with the bassline.. try playing round. I could be completely offtrack but i thought id throw that one in.

easy

G
 
There is a good video tutorial on onlinemusicproduction.com (not sure if that's the exact address just google it) called sidechaining, which pretty much covers exactly how to deal with this issue in Reason 3.0. Check it out.
 
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If you want that west coast slidin effect, try composing the bass in monophonic mode so it just slides with or without portamento, it may help mix the line into the beat.
 
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