Drum & bass isn't just music, it's a study on how to make the biggest bass line. It's not only a case of turning the bass up loud. If it were that easy then everyone would be doing it. You need to process your bass line with dynamics-altering tools and squeeze as much as possible into a limited space.

 

Of course, it's also about picking the right sound to begin with, whether you generate it with a synthesiser, play it on a guitar or steal it like a pirate from someone else's record. It's also about your mix – you can make the bass the focal point of your track and bond everything to it. But it's hard to be disciplined in the aforementioned.

Here are ten things to keep in mind when trying to create a bass line that hurts people. Don't forget – bass is the soul of a song. Listen to classic soul music – James Brown is a good starting point – and EQ out that bass. Everything dies, because the low end is what makes people move. Considering that drum & bass was born from funk and soul drums, listen to this:

1. Synth Waves

Most drum & bass music features bass lines made from synthesisers. Some of the best drum & bass contains live bass though, such as Brown Paper Bag by Reprazent. But in 2010, these kinds of tracks are becoming increasingly rare. The top dogs – Dillinja, Pendulum, Noisia and Sub Focus flagrantly use synthesiser bass.

Try not to be overwhelmed by the array of plug-ins out there and their settings. At the end of the day it's all about the sub bass. Even the most complex tracks have a simple bass melody with a basic sub bass. Yes, these can be layered up endlessly, but strip away that and you'll see the light.

Choosing the wave-type is critical. Today's synthesisers offer a bewildering array of waves, but they are all edits of the four basic ones – saw-tooth, sine, square and the lesser-used triangle (which is by definition a variation of the saw tooth). Each wave produces a different kind of bass. Understand these and you can start controlling your productions.

Sine: a smooth wave with very little character, but the strongest bass there is. Editing sine waves with filters and so forth don't produce mind-blowing results. It is what it is – a pure tone. That said, it has interesting applications away from bass, and you must distort it if you want any kind of character. The more you distort it, the more low frequencies you are taking away. Unlayered sines aren't suited to poppy productions because you can barely hear low notes on inbuilt laptop or small speakers – they are dance-floor material. This is a great wave to layer drum & bass melodies with, which you can hear in effect on Pendulum's classic Vault and Origin Unknown's Valley of the Shadows.

Square: this is the most versatile wave there is, and produces dynamic results when filtered or modulated. It's the most audible type of bass, and you can hear it if you play it on your laptop speakers. It has a robotic machine-like quality, what with it being the same shape as binary data. The square wave is a perfect match for robotic, computery music, and what it lacks in raw sub it makes up for in versatility and fatness.

Saw tooth: the saw tooth is flexible in that it can be edited to have a downward or upward slope, changing the feel of the bass. It is more dynamic than the sine but thinner sounding than the bulky square. Layering saw-tooth waves together and detuning them – unlike the mess resulting from sines – produces endlessly interesting results. Saw tooth waves are coming into fashion in DnB because producers like DJ Fresh, Instra:mental, Camo & Krooked and Sub Focus are making music influenced by electro house, and that genre has been defined by saw-tooth bass lines in the last five years.

Triangle: Triangle waves make up the infamous Reese bass line from Ray Keith's defining Terrorist track. Just layer two together and detune them through a low-pass filter to achieve this. They sound like sine waves but have more harmonics to play with.

2. It's Already There

Sometimes, the bass is already in the drums. This theory is proved by techno, tech house and minimal. Most dance-music producers start with a drum loop when making a song. Going hell for leather on the drums can leave very little room for more bass.

 

Truth be told, most drum & bass music filters sub out of the drums to accommodate bombastic bass lines. But some drums can become the bass line, and if this is the case, why not just leave them and let the melody bond for interesting results? In 4/4 music, it's usually the bassy tom drums on the off beats that become the bass line after they've been pitched down.

 

To summarise, the most famous DnB bass line is actually a kick drum called the 808 developed by the Roland company that was pitched around by experimental producers. Check out the bass stab in Dillinja's Nitrous remix for an example of a single kick drum becoming a bass line.

3. Simplicity

The best bass lines are simple. Listen to a classic track from any genre – hip hop, drum & bass, rock – this becomes clear. The slow, certain thud of the bass should be anchoring the flailing madness above it.

4. Placement

With drum & bass music's components not leaving much elbowroom for any fat, placement of the bass can open up other areas of creativity. If you put the bass line on the off beat, for example, not only can you create a very interesting groove but then the kick drum is free to do damage on its own. See entry number two for an elaboration on this, and listen to Ska by DJ Zinc for an example.

5. Live

Live bass is beautiful. Live bass is a human fingerprint of a song. The way a real person can play a bass guitar is something that cannot be replicated by a machine – the beautiful imperfections, the slides and rolls and so on.

 

All the classic drum & bass breaks are taken from tracks using oodles of bass guitar. They go together. Ant Miles – one half of a duo that defined drum & bass – has an array of bass guitars in his studio. Listen to his and Andy C's remix of Truly One and witness the power of an organic bass line in full effect.

 

That said, playing a bass line live on a keyboard and being stringent with manual quantising can produce exciting results. If you don't like live bass – fuck it – load up the synthesiser square wave and quantise to 16ths.

6. Warmth

Warmth has to be the most overused and irritating term in music production. Good examples of warmth are in tracks by Dillinja, even though he makes his music now without the eponymous equipment of his record label Valve.

 

Without wanting to drag you through a history lesson, warmth comes from "real" sound … sound which isn't generated by binary data in your computer but sound that is generated by a conductive process from analogue synthesisers, for example. There is an array of analogue synthesiser samples out there.

7. EQ

You all know what an EQ is and what it does, so what else is there to say? That all EQs sound different. Some are very musical – it's a cliché but it's true – others are functional. Spending some money on a good EQ is not a bad idea, as cheap ones tend to be coarse and rough.

 

Oh, and if you want to know something really interesting – hardware EQs metaphorically ass rape software ones. Especially valve EQs … but this isn't a realistic option for the bedroom DnB producer. And do you have the patience to work with an EQ without instant recall?

8. Monitoring

Your monitor speakers are everything in making a good bass line. It's nice to know that many top DnB producers use incredibly cheap, budget speakers and still dominate the scene. Most of the classic tracks have been made on the recently upgraded Mackie HD824 speakers, which cost under £1,000.

 

Then again, the master of the bass line Dillinja uses one (yes, one) mono Yamaha NS10 monitor to make music. The fact that this ancient speaker doesn't go below 80 Hz tells you everything you need to know.

9. Movement

When bass moves, it is very audible. Consider using LFOs and pitch envelopes on your bass lines. Even sine waves become audible on the cheapest of car stereos in such instances. Rolling bass down with a pitch bend in DnB music is a marriage made in heaven.

10. Cheat

You can always sample bass from a great producer, and mask the results with a few edits. You bastard.

 

Related Links:

• 5 Ways To Make A Killer Bass Line
• Neumann Release Monitor Speakers
• Old Skool Classic: Cybersonik - Technarchy
• Sinewaves Turbo Plug-in
• The Essential... Metalheadz

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