stop layering every note of your bassline

here's the move that fixes most muddy basslines: play less. not a quieter bass, not a smaller bass. fewer notes. that wall-to-wall run of 16th notes you keep stacking up is why your low end sounds like one long buzz instead of something that actually moves a room. the space between the notes is part of the bassline.

it sounds too simple, so let's back it up: why your kick and bass keep fighting (they're chasing the same tiny slice of the frequency range), a step-by-step way to strip a busy line down until it grooves, how to keep a simple bassline interesting without writing a melody, and what to fill all that new space with. spoiler: not more bass.

why your kick and bass keep fighting

in house and most other four-on-the-floor music, the kick drum hits on every beat of the bar: 1, 2, 3, 4. a kick is mostly low end. so is a bass. and there's only so much room down there. Sound On Sound's Mike Senior calls the clash between them "the most critical sub-100Hz conflict in modern mixes", because the low frequencies of kick and bass are "normally responsible for the lion's share of the mix bus's output level". sub-100Hz just means everything below 100 hertz, the deep part you feel in your chest more than you hear, and the mix bus is the master channel where all your tracks add up.

so when a bass note lands at the exact same moment as the kick, the two pile on top of each other. your meters jump, the mix gets louder in the wrong place, and the kick loses its punch. MusicRadar describes it as the bass "masking the punch of your kick drum". masking is when one sound hides another because they share the same frequencies, a bit like two people trying to talk at the same pitch at the same time. there are two classic ways out, and you can use both:

• move the bass off the kick. Mike Senior calls separating kick and bass in time "a time-honoured technique of the dance fraternity", and points to the off-beat bass in Kylie's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" as the textbook example. an offbeat bass sits on the "and" between the kicks. count "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and": the kick gets the numbers, the bass gets the "ands". the two stop arm-wrestling and start trading punches.
• duck the bass when the kick hits. that's sidechain compression. a compressor turns a sound down when it gets loud, and normally it listens to the sound it's working on. with a sidechain, it listens to something else: in MusicRadar's words, it's "when the level of one instrument causes a compressor to activate on another instrument." set the kick as the trigger and the bass dips for a split second on every kick, then springs back. their starting point: attack (how fast the compressor grabs) all the way down to 0 ms, "a quick release time" (release is how fast it lets go), a threshold (the level where it kicks in) around -25 and a ratio (how hard it pushes down) of about 3:1. and remember their warning: "subtlety can be key". you want room for the kick, not a seasick pump, unless the pump is the sound you're after.

either way, the goal is the same: one thing at a time in the sub.

mute notes until it grooves, don't add them

most weak basslines are over-written. you played a busy line, liked one bit of it, then kept everything around it because deleting felt like losing something. flip the process. Attack Magazine's guide to bassline styles puts it bluntly: "what you leave out is as important as what you leave in." the same piece notes that "leaving gaps and avoiding too many notes on the downbeat adds a sense of anticipation." the downbeat is the start of each beat, right where the kick lands, so that's the same idea twice: the gaps are doing the work. here's a step-by-step way to find them:

• fill the bar with 16ths. put your root note on every 16th step of one bar. the root is the note a chord is named after (under a C minor chord, it's C), and a 16th is a quarter of a beat, so a four-beat bar has 16 of them. now you can see the whole grid.
• mute every note that lands on a kick. that's steps 1, 5, 9 and 13. instant offbeat skeleton.
• delete half of what's left. seriously. solo the bass and find the three or four hits that make your head nod.
• add notes back one at a time and stop the moment it feels busy. the last note you wanted to add is usually the one to leave out.
• leave a full beat of silence somewhere in the bar. that gap is what makes the next note hit.

a two-bar loop that breathes will almost always beat a one-bar loop that's stuffed. give the listener a hole and their ear leans in to fill it. we go deeper on the offbeat side in rolling house rolls because of what's off the beat.

movement comes from rhythm and sound, not a melody

you don't need a runaway bass melody to sound interesting. Ableton's Learning Music course describes basslines as low notes that "often serve to reinforce a song's chords, while also using interesting rhythmic patterns that relate to or contrast with the drums." look at that job description: back up the chords, play with the rhythm. writing a new tune down there is optional.

one of the most famous early house tracks proves it. Attack Magazine points to Mr Fingers' "Can You Feel It" as a track that's "predominantly about kick and bass", built on "a simple octave-spanning note pattern" played on a Roland Juno-6. the key detail: "although the notes themselves remained the same throughout, the sound itself underwent continuous tweaking." same notes, moving sound. here's how to get that kind of movement without writing more notes:

• octave jumps. drop the same root down an octave for one hit per bar. an octave is the same note, just higher or lower, so it fits anywhere the root already fits. instant weight, no new note.
• glide. glide, also called portamento, makes the pitch slide smoothly from one note to the next instead of jumping. turn it on and let one note bend up to the fifth, then come back to the root. one gesture, loads of life.
• note length. a short, plucky note and a long, droning note feel like two different instruments. change how long the notes are before you change which notes they are.
• the root, the fifth and the octave. when you do move, these are the safest notes under a chord. the fifth sits seven semitones above the root, and Wikipedia's entry on the interval explains why it works: the perfect fifth is "more consonant, or stable, than any other interval except the unison and the octave." consonant just means it sounds settled instead of tense.
• tweak the sound, not the notes. open the filter slowly, push a little drive. that's the "Can You Feel It" trick.

keep the low end solid

a simple bassline only works if the floor under it is clean. two rules:

• keep the sub in mono. mono means the same signal in both speakers, so the bass sits dead centre. Sound On Sound warns that "many PAs sum low frequencies to mono", which means a club system adds your left and right channels together down low. a bass that's wide in the sub can partly cancel itself out when that happens, so keep the deep part centred.
• cut the rumble you can't hear. a high-pass filter removes everything below a cutoff point. Mike Senior suggests "a 20-30Hz high-pass filter for safety" whenever you boost the low end, and another Sound On Sound feature explains why: extremely low frequencies can produce huge signals "that are almost inaudible. This wastes headroom". headroom is the space between your loudest peak and the point where things distort, so rumble nobody hears eats loudness you could spend on the kick and bass everybody does.

common mistakes when you strip a bassline back

• filling the space with more bass. the whole point of stripping back is that you opened up the arrangement. don't refill it with a second bass layer, a sub under the sub, or a busier pattern.
• stripping it until there's no pulse. if you've deleted every note on the "and", you've probably deleted the groove too. keep at least two or three hits that answer the kick.
• judging it on solo. a bassline that sounds boring alone often sounds perfect against the drums. decide with the kick playing.
• letting long notes run into the kick. a held note will still be sounding when the next kick lands. end it before the kick, or duck it with a sidechain.

now fill the space you made, up top

once the bass is simple, the mids it used to crowd are free, and that's where chord stabs and pads do their best work. a short, offbeat chord stab answering the bass (bass on the "and" of 1, stab on the "and" of 2) gives you that back-and-forth house bounce without adding a single thing to the low end. and because the bass is now simple, the chords can carry the emotion: a 7th here, a 9th there, a held pad under the drop. a 7th or 9th chord is just a normal chord with one more note stacked on top, and to our ears that extra note is where the warm, slightly unfinished house sound comes from.

that's exactly the gap chordBox was built to fill. it's 300 chords (150 major, 150 minor) sampled from six real hardware synths, including a Roland D50, a Yamaha DX7II, an Oberheim OB-X and a Roland Jupiter X, recorded through a Neve 1073 preamp and an API 2500 compressor. pads, keys and synths, with 7ths, 9ths and beyond, plus attack and release controls to make them short and stabby, a filter to tuck them behind the drums, and transpose to shift any chord into your key. it runs as VST3 / AU in any DAW.

want the bass itself off real hardware too? bassBox has 141 bass presets played on a Yamaha DX7II, a Roland Jupiter X, a Roland JV-1080 and an Oberheim OB-6. its ADSR and GLIDE controls map straight onto the moves above (short or long notes, slides into the fifth), and its WIDTH knob keeps the sub centred while the top spreads out. why each of those machines sounds different is in four machines, one low end. Belterbot's one rule: write the bass, then put the bass down and let the chords say the rest. press play. make a belter.

sources

• Mixing Bass (Sound On Sound)
• Crafting Loud Mixes That Sound Great (Sound On Sound)
• How to sidechain your bass and kick drum (MusicRadar)
• Low-End Theory: Exploring Eight Common Bassline Styles (Attack Magazine)
• Make basslines (Ableton Learning Music)
• Perfect fifth (Wikipedia)
• Portamento (Wikipedia)