I am really struggling on archiving a decent sub bass.
Either the bass isn’t audible at all or it just doesn’t sound deep enough. Also when having a low sub bass that kind of sounds right I tend to use lots of eq (of course also hi passing at 35 or so) to emphasize the bass which pulls up my levels and make mixing a hell.
Theoretically the sub shouldn’t go below 40 Hz and not above 55 or so, right? So it would be wise to stick to using notes e - a only? But then I couldn’t have any other base keys for my sounds or the sub and the sounds wouldn’t match.
I just took the first example I found on sound cloud.
There the bass appears to be really deep but I can even hear it on my laptop speakers.
When making drum & bass I usually had two sounds for layering but obviously this was a completely different type of sound.
So could I theoretically use one of the AR’s Kicks to make such a bass?
How do the bass and kick relate to each other? are the sounds playing an octave apart or are they just playing random intervals?
I’ve employed a technique that yields a similar result in this track:
Basically, it involves reverberating the kick with a long tail, then band-pass filtering the reverberation down to around 30hz thru 50hz, then giving the result a sharp Q EQ boost in the same resonant frequency as the kick.
You get the sub bass to play off the kick by side-chain compressing the reverberation heavily, with the kick as the key input.
That way when the kick hits, the sub bass completely gets out of the way.
The sub bass serves as a heavy low end extension of the kick, free of attack.
There is a reason we didn’t hear bass this huge until DAWs became commonplace in electronic music. It can be somewhat involved with dedicated hardware. To do this with Rytm you would have to utilize the individual voice outputs (or Overbridge multi track outputs), a band-pass filter unit, a reverb unit, (possibly) an additional EQ, and a compressor with a key-type (not fx loop-type, a’la RNC/RNLA) side-chain input to compress the reverberated sub bass.
If you really want to get the sound out of your Rytm for live stage purposes, I suggest setting it up in a DAW with Overbridge, and then sampling the sum of the kick and the reverberated sub bass, and then importing that into your Rytm as its own, sample based kick track.
It’s a process, but more than worth it.
Thanks for your answer, did it exactly like this. Used Valhalla Vintage Verb in Live for reverberation, also some saturation before the filter. room size, predealy and delay are really nice to generate some movement within the reverb.
Tried layering a bass underneath (Abletons tuner said the reverb-bass is playing note A) didn’t work properly however with some processing the (rreverb) bass can be shaped really nice and is rich in the bottom end as well as audible on smaller speakers.
used a separate bass drum (from my a4) for it and took the reverb signal 100% dry only. Going to try different kicks for reverberation after finishing this track.
Bare in mind that when you can hear the bass/sub out of your laptop speakers - the mixing engineer may well have used something like Waves’ RBass or MaxxBass - which basically adds harmonic content to frequencies above the notes being played by the bass line. So it isn’t actually the sub you can hear out of your laptop, it’s harmonic content.
