Making Bass

The problem I see the most with amateur producers is making bass. It takes a lot of work to be able to match keys successfully, and you’ll need to do that to make bass that doesn’t interfere and sound horrible alongside your sample. After people DO find the keys, there’s a lot that goes into making a nice bassline pattern. A Low-Pass filter can help.

What is a low-pass filter?

In its simplest form, a low-pass filter is just a plugin that you can put on a sample to take out all of the highs and keep just the lows (the bass). This way, you can have the bass accentuated in a hip-hop style without messing with keys and programming basslines. This technique will work better with some samples than it will with others, as it relies on the bass already in the sample.

If you use Fruity Loops, you’re in luck. FL Studio (at least FL Studio XXL 7 which is what I use) has a Low-Pass filter already in it. It’s called Fruity Fast-LP, and it’s very simple to use. Put it in your plugin list, and then make two files of your sample all chopped up and put them both in your playlist. Take one of them, and put them on a mixer channel, and then go to the mixer channel’s properties and put the Fast-LP plugin on. Test different basses by soloing out the sample you’re using for bass (just drop the volume on the other one) and mess with the Cutoff and the Resonance. Then add volume back to your other sample, play around with the two respective volumes, and there’s your pounding bass.

If you don’t have Fruity Loops, a version with the Fruity Fast-LP filter, or just prefer to do things outside of FL first, you can still do this. Plugin masters Waves have a low-pass filter called the LFE360 Low-Pass Filter and it can be used in any audio editing program that can accept RTAS or VST. I’m sure there are other programs out there, probably free ones, so feel free to look those up as well.

Enjoy your basslines.

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