Does Psytrance lack sub-bass

Another good Cosmosis track for sub bass is track 1 from Intergalactic - 'Brainwaves'. It's got some bass pitchbends (high to low), which go so low, that most speakers won't pick up all the detail. It wasn't until I heard it played on a rig at a party, that I was able to hear the very bottom of the pitch bend, and was surprised to find that it actually bounces upwards a bit.

I often make basslines from recording a section by midi keyboard, to get some natural funky swing to it. Then I quantise, clean it up, and fill in any gaps of silence with root key notes (usually root key), at 16ths to beef it up more towards a 16th thingy...but keeping the original velocities and melodies and other expression like pitch bend gives it a groovy flavour.

I'm thinking about a way to clean up sub - if a filtered or EQ'd copy of the bassline is put through a gate, perhaps a MIDI gate using the original bassline midi, you can reduce the length of the sub notes thus making each note easier to identify. It may be better than simply boosting up the sub on the original bassline audio, cos in myexperience it usually comes out quit sustained or muddy - in the case of fast 16th basslines.

K
 
(On my PC) using a MIDI gate to clean up the bassline in this way cuts off the beginning of the note; you have to pre-delay the gate track. I haven't tried feeding the gate from a MIDI send on the bass track though (cos I only thought of it right now) so if anyone can tell me if it works, please let me know as I'm not in the studio again for a few days!
 
Well, you can process the bass with plugins till it's got the right tone/sonic qualities, and you can end up with the whole bassline bounced/mixdowned to an audio part as long as the length of the whole track. Throw in a MIDI gate on this audio at the last point, using the original MIDI part of the bassline to control it. Then you can offset the audio by the tiniest fractions to make sure the get the very begginning of each strike of the bass...simple.

The reason for using the MIDI gate at the last point - after all the other plugins is because some of the plugins are what can cause the muddiness. The gate can reduce the volum in-between the notes to provide more clarity.

I haven't got round to doing this yet in practice either, so this is just pure theory, which must put to the test now that I've blogged it out!

I'm also assuming that with sub-bass, it should be clearer too. If not, a possible solution would be to have a seperate sub-bass part, to which you apply a tighter gate, and then mix it with the 'upper' bass part and you have seamless(?) bassline with throbbing sub, but where the sub is is slightly shorter.

Some amps/speakers I gugess have varying sub-bass response - making the sub tones seem almost a constant tone throughout a measure of 16th-note basslines. My idea of gating the sub may well be a way of clearing it up.

K
 
I thnk a lot of clarity is in the attack of the note. I have had very satisfactory results using Pentagon in a one-oscillator configuration; on its own and without any processing it is capable of 16th sub-basslines at 144 bpm where each note consists of 3 or 4 cycles of bass, with a very short release leaving plenty of silence between notes - and with an attack that is brutal, to say the least. And you can still tell the pitch of the bass, too. I've posted the patch on here before somewhere, I seem to recall.
 
Pentagon is great! I've used it in my latest project. I had problems with one thing though, and that wat attack of it! It had a nasty click right at the begging, due to the way the envelop work.

It has Attack time, Hold time, Decay time, Sustain level, and Release time.
I found it frustrating trying to make sure that there weren't any 'pops' at the beginning and end of a note. There was clicking/poping at the end of the note when having the Release time set to anything less than the knob pointing North-East (whatever value that is). The same for the Attack time affecting the start of a note.

All I wanted was and instant attack and instant release - took me ages to get the envelopes right for it.

What sort of envelope did you use?
 
Can't remember off the top of my head, but the oscillator phase has a lot to do with it... and anyway I was specifically going for that clicky attack... I had the attack set to 0, I think, and the oscillator (pure sine) set to key sync with the phase to 90'; the resulting waveform has a vertical attack to the top of the sine wavecycle. You can then adjust the envelope attack to taste. Also try changing the envelope slope types.
 
well - quite possibly its just me and my cheapo monitoring solution, but also sitting a nice fat kick on top of stuttering sub can cause a big headache.

It is possible, and getting very active with resonance and the filter envelope is certainly the way, this has a positive upshot in that the definition of each seperate note becomes much clearer.

If you can't get the sound right through the envelope, try layering 'em up like (rumored) necton do on there kicks - i.e. nice attack with hp, nice sub with lp mixed together equals nice bass! kinda tricky though....

beleive me, after years of trying to get this right, the easiest thing for a useable bass is STILL a nice single oscillator with a decent resonant filter. if it sounds to weedy, a bit of chorus can beef it up nicely, but watch that stereo positioning!

all, just in my opinion! :runsmile:
 
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