Making a sub-bass line?

[mjn]

Hey guys, I'm a massive fan of all electronic music, and currently hooked on the UK Techno sound and the more experimental sounds promoted by Swamp 81 etc.

Having said that, I have NO idea how to work with sub-bass effectively.. I have no idea where to place the notes, and no idea how to get them to work effectively with the kick to create a bouncing, rolling bassline?

Any advice would be welcome!

 

[Ddream]

You can work with the sub in every way you want to work, really. I've listened to tracks where the sub is used to pronounce the power of the kick, and, as well, to follow the melody for the bassline. There are even tracks where there's little to no sub (I discovered one, by running a spectrum analyzer to Shellshock by Noisia).

To make it work well with the kick, you need to consider using techniques like sidechain compression, or by simply cutting out the frequencies that are clashing with the kick. I personally like to sidechain just those frequencies of the sub, leaving the rest as it is.

 

[mjn]

To make it work well with the kick, you need to consider using techniques like sidechain compression, or by simply cutting out the frequencies that are clashing with the kick. I personally like to sidechain just those frequencies of the sub, leaving the rest as it is.

Yeah sidechain would be a good idea; my main issue is that with a lot of songs, I can sort of hear how everything is put together whilst listening, and work out how each aspect would have been made, but with sub-bass, it's completely lost on me, I can't pinpoint where their notes are placed, or how to replicate! I guess it comes down to practice!

 

[Ddream]

Yeah sidechain would be a good idea; my main issue is that with a lot of songs, I can sort of hear how everything is put together whilst listening, and work out how each aspect would have been made, but with sub-bass, it's completely lost on me, I can't pinpoint where their notes are placed, or how to replicate! I guess it comes down to practice!

Yeah, pretty much: you need to experiement and need to see what are the things that help you make the sound you want. And listen lots of tracks. Using them as reference helps as well.

 

[SunFantasy]

Also if you want your sub to be more pronounced and more audible on shitty headphones and laptop speakers. Try adding Harmonics to it in the 400-600hz range

 

[JordanHarris]

Also if you want your sub to be more pronounced and more audible on shitty headphones and laptop speakers. Try adding Harmonics to it in the 400-600hz range

Just wondering, but what do you mean by adding harmonics? Like what would you use to do that? Sometimes I'll use like a really small amount of distortion on my sub bass.

 

[bandcoach]

distortion is one way to add harmonics, another way would be to stack a similar sound an octave higher then a 5th above that and so on up the harmonic series

 

[rayzer]

i find some compression great to bring out a sub bass but not to the point of distortion, maybe some 50hz boost to make the floor rumble a bit. depending on how smooth you want the bass to be play with the volume attack and release. for a bit of extra tone use a heavily lowpass filtered saw or triangle osc on top.

 

[Ametrine]

I usually use the same sub notes as the bass notes that are audible. I do this to prevent low end muddiness, which can be very noticeable if those notes differ.

I personally don't add distortion to my sub, but I layer it with a higher frequency sub to make it audible. In a sense, I guess that's kind of the same thing.