four machines, one low end: the hardware behind house bass

two basslines. same notes, same groove, same kick. one sounds like a demo, the other moves the floor. nine times out of ten the difference isn't the notes. it's the machine the bass came out of. every synth engine puts out its own set of harmonics, and those harmonics decide whether your bass cuts through on a phone, glues to the kick, or turns into mud on a club system.

so let's go through the four machines that shaped a lot of the low end you hear in house and garage: what each one actually is, why it sounds the way it does, and how to use that sound in a track.

yamaha dx7ii: the glassy, punchy one

the original dx7 landed in 1983 and it didn't work like anything before it. instead of filtering a buzzy waveform, it uses FM synthesis: six sine-wave "operators" per voice, wired together in 32 different algorithms, where one sine bends the pitch of another thousands of times a second. the result is bright, glassy and very defined. its "bass 1" preset alone turns up on a-ha's "take on me" and kenny loggins' "danger zone". the dx7ii followed in 1987 and added the big upgrade: it's bi-timbral, so you can split or layer two sounds at once.

why that matters for bass: FM bass has a hard, clicky front edge and a clean, almost hollow body. it doesn't fill the room, it pokes. that's exactly what you want for:

• short garage stabs that bounce against a shuffled hat pattern.
• plucky bass on the offbeat, where the attack does the rhythmic work and the tail gets out of the way.
• a top layer over a plain sine sub, so the bass reads on laptop speakers without adding weight down low.

roland jupiter: warm analogue and the reese

the modern roland jupiter-x carries analogue-behaviour models of the jupiter-8, juno-106, jx-8p and sh-101. sound on sound compared it side by side with a real jupiter-8 and wrote that programming it "can feel much like programming a jupiter 8". that's the warm, thick, slightly unstable analogue sound: two oscillators that never sit perfectly still against each other.

and that drift is where one of the most famous basses in dance music comes from. in 1988 kevin saunderson, recording as reese, made "just want another chance" on a casio cz. he stacked two slightly detuned waves, and the tiny pitch difference makes them drift in and out of phase. you hear it as a slow, dark, swirling movement. that's the reese. in 1994 ray keith, as renegade, slammed it against the amen break on "terrorist", and from there it fed jungle, drum & bass, speed garage and bassline.

to make one yourself: two oscillators in mono mode, one tuned up and one tuned down by a fraction of a semitone. attack magazine's reese tutorial starts at ±0.27 semitones. more detune = faster swirl. then filter it so the swirl lives in the mids, not the sub (more on that below).

roland jv-1080: the 90s rompler weight

the jv-1080 came out in 1994: a 2U rack of sample playback with synth filters on top. 64 voices, 640 patches, 8MB of sounds expandable with slot-in cards, and 40 insert effects. a lot of its factory sounds were programmed by eric persing, who went on to found spectrasonics. it wasn't trying to be an analogue synth. it played back recorded waveforms, then let you filter and shape them.

that's why jv basses sound so finished. the raw material already has body and polish baked in, so a jv bass sits in a mix almost straight out of the box. use that kind of sound when you want a solid, round bass that stays put under busy chords and vocals, or when a track needs that unmistakable late-90s shine.

oberheim ob-6: the growl

the ob-6 is tom oberheim and dave smith building a synth together, released in 2016. six voices, two analogue oscillators per voice, and the heart of it: a filter based on oberheim's classic SEM. it's a 12dB-per-octave state-variable filter that sweeps smoothly from low-pass through notch to high-pass, with a band-pass mode on top.

12dB is a gentler slope than the classic 24dB ladder filter, so more of the upper harmonics survive even when the filter is fairly closed. that's the "fizzy" edge people hear in oberheims, and it's why sound on sound's review lists "monstrous basses" among the things it does well. stack the voices in unison and you get a wide, snarling bass that still has a clear pitch.

• sweep the filter across a four-bar build instead of automating volume. the bass gets brighter and more urgent without getting louder.
• try the notch position on a sustained bass. it carves a hole in the middle of the sound and makes room for a vocal.

whatever machine you use: make it work on a real system

great tone means nothing if it falls apart on a club rig. three rules that apply to all four:

• keep the sub in mono, dead centre. as sound on sound puts it, many club PAs sum the low frequencies to mono, so a stereo sub that looks huge on your monitors can lose level the moment it hits a real rig. keep roughly the bottom 100Hz mono and let the wide, swirly stuff (reese, unison, chorus) live above it.
• high-pass your effect returns. delay and reverb on bass are fine, even great (we made a case for throwing echo on your bassline), as long as the returns don't smear the sub.
• leave gaps. the biggest bass tone in the world still needs space around the kick. if your bass line is busy, stop layering every note of it and let the rhythm carry it.

or skip the hardware shopping

getting all four of these machines into one studio costs serious money and a lot of rack space. that's why we built bassBox. 141 bass presets, every one played into real hardware: 59 from a dx7ii with its expansion card, 30 from a jupiter-x, 28 from a jv-1080 and 24 from an ob-6. each preset is multisampled across 21 zones, so it tracks from C1 to C5 instead of falling apart two octaves up. the WIDTH knob keeps the sub tight and centred while the top spreads out, which is rule one above, built in. VST3 / AU, any DAW.

write the bass, then give it something to talk to. chordBox covers the chords, sampled from real vintage synths too. press play. make a belter.

sources

• Yamaha DX7 (Wikipedia)
• Roland Jupiter-X review (Sound On Sound)
• Reese: Just Want Another Chance, deconstructed (Attack Magazine)
• Reese bass redux (Attack Magazine)
• How Kevin Saunderson's Reese bassline transformed UK dance music (Mixmag)
• Blast from the past: Roland JV-1080 (MusicRadar)
• Dave Smith Instruments OB6 review (Sound On Sound)
• Mixing bass (Sound On Sound)