Time For Some Bass

Today it was time to add some bass to my remix of The Message and I started off by checking out the original bass riff. Here’s what it sounded like, thanks to iZotope RX 8’s Music Rebalance function:

The song is in G minor, and both the synthesiser and bass riff use the G minor pentatonic scale. The bass is walking down the scale like this:

♭7 5 4 ♭3 1

I’m keeping the original vocals so I don’t want to change key, but I thought I’d take a lesson from George Kostanza and do the opposite so my bass riff walks up instead. Plus, I thought I’d make it a bit bluesier by throwing in the ♭5 blue note from the G minor blues scale, to give:

1 ♭3 4 ♭5 5 ♭7

I also used a completely different rhythm, which syncopates with my drum rhythm and the vocals. A complicating factor here is that the original bass riff is two bars long, which works really well with pairs of vocal phrases. I’ve cut the vocals into phrases a single bar long for use in Live Loops, and having loops of different lengths gets really messy. I didn’t want to go back and re-edit all my vocal phrases so after failing to find a way around this, I concluded that having a single bar bass riff was going to have to do. Here’s what it looks like in the MIDI editor:

Synchronising the bass riff with the vocals involved applying the same Start position for each bass loop as the drum loops, as described in Introducing The Step Sequencer; which confused the heck out of me in Verse 2 for a while because I hadn’t applied it to the drum loops correctly. That’s fixed now.

To create a funky sounding 80’s techno bass sound, I used the Alchemy synthesiser, which I’ve been learning about. Not only did I read the manual, I also watched all 13 parts of MusicTechHelpGuy’s Alchemy Synthesiser Tutorial Series. I combined three sources for the sound:

1. Sine to give a nice clean sound
2. Sine – Add1248 for extra harmonics
3. Eighties Notch for “good dirt”

I panned the different sources to get a wide, fat bass sound and adjusted the volume of each to get a good sound in the mix. While I liked how the instrument sounded in isolation, I found I needed more “dirt” when I added it to the mix.

Here are the settings:

I really only scratched the surface of what Alchemy can do here, but it’s a start.

Here are the ten random bars from two posts ago, with bass: