there are no rules: throw echo on your bassline

somewhere along the way, producers decided echo belongs on vocals and leads, never on the bass. most people just nodded and moved on. but there are no rules in music production. there's only what works and what doesn't, and one of our favourite "wrong" moves is throwing a delay straight onto a bassline.

done badly, it's a muddy mess. done right, it gives you groove, width and a low end that feels alive instead of static. below we explain why the rule exists (it has a point), what an echo actually does to a bassline, and a step-by-step way to set one up so it adds movement without wrecking your low end. then three moves to try on your next track.

"never put delay on your bass." says who?

first, what we're talking about. a delay, or echo, records what you play and plays it back a moment later. Wikipedia's definition is nice and plain: delay "records an input signal to a storage medium and then plays it back after a period of time." the feedback control sends some of that echo back into the delay again, which is how you get more than one repeat. Ableton's manual describes it as "how much of each channel's output signal feeds back into the delay lines' inputs." low feedback gives you one or two repeats. high feedback gives you a long trail of them.

the rule against echo on bass exists for a reason. Sound On Sound's Mike Senior explains that bass rarely gets heavy send effects because "the solidity, clarity and power of its harmonic support can be adversely affected", and that "delays and reverbs can drown the groove and muddy the overall mix tonality." in plain words: the bass holds the whole track up, and a long echo smearing its deep notes into each other turns that solid floor into a boomy blur. so the rule isn't wrong. it's just lazy. it bans the whole idea instead of teaching you how to do it safely. treat it like "no running by the pool": mostly sensible, occasionally the most fun you'll have all day.

why echo on a bassline actually works

here's the thing: one of dance music's staple bass styles is almost made for it. Attack Magazine, describing the offbeat bassline (bass notes placed between the kicks), says the pulsing notes, the fact that "bass and kick do not clash" and the straight feel of the other parts "make this bass very well suited to additional delay processing." their suggested starting point is a delay locked to your project tempo, "for example, a dotted 8th-note delay." a short, controlled echo does three things for a bass that nothing else does as cheaply:

• groove. the repeats land between your main notes as ghost notes: quieter in-between hits that make a two-note bassline feel like it's rolling. an 8th note is half a beat, and a dot makes a note longer "by half of its value" (Wikipedia again), so a dotted 8th is three quarters of a beat, or three 16th steps. on an offbeat bass, that small difference decides whether the echo lands right on your next kick or slides neatly into the gap, as the grid below shows.
• width. echo only the upper part of the bass and spread those repeats out to the sides. the bass feels big and wide while the deep part stays locked in the middle.
• movement. a touch of feedback and some saturation on the repeats gives the low end a living, slightly wobbly feel instead of a flat, static note. saturation is gentle distortion that adds extra overtones, and Sound On Sound points out it can make "a subby bass more audible on smaller speakers".

where that echo sound comes from: tape

the sound most of us are chasing when we say "echo" comes from tape. early tape delays, Wikipedia explains, used "loops of tape that pass over a record head and then a playback head", and the time between repeats changed with the head position or the tape speed. Roland's RE-201 Space Echo, introduced in 1974, is the famous one. it has "a single recording head and three playback heads", a Repeat Rate knob that, in Roland's own words, adjusted the delay time "by altering the tape's speed", and an Intensity knob that "lets you dial in the number of repeats". that's the same delay time and feedback you've got on every plugin today. it stayed in production until 1990, and Wikipedia notes that the Jamaican reggae producer Lee "Scratch" Perry "used it extensively in the 1970s."

how to do it without turning your low end to mud

the whole trick: echo the character, not the sub. keep the deep part of the bass dry and mono, and let only the mids and highs ring out. and do it on a send, not as an insert. an insert effect sits directly on the bass channel, so the whole bass goes through it. a send (also called an aux) is a separate channel you feed a copy of the bass into, so the dry bass stays untouched and one fader controls how much echo you add.

• high-pass the echo. put a high-pass filter on the send so the repeats have no deep end. for any effect on bass, Mike Senior suggests "high-pass filtering the effect returns", because it "will keep the sub-100Hz region clear and solid." Attack Magazine shows the same thing in its bassline examples, where "the delay repeats have little low-frequency content", so the echo works on a bass part "without creating a low-end mess." we like to start the cutoff somewhere around 200-300Hz and move it by ear.
• sync it and keep it short. set the delay to follow your project tempo and start with a dotted 8th. most delays offer synced note values, and Ableton's Echo, for example, has Notes, Triplet, Dotted and 16th modes. on an offbeat bass, avoid a straight 8th: every repeat lands right on top of the next kick, exactly where you don't want extra low end.
• keep the feedback low. one or two repeats, not infinity. you want a tail, not a haunting.
• duck the repeats. ducking means turning the echo down automatically while the dry bass is playing, so the repeats only poke through in the gaps. Sound On Sound calls it "one simple trick to thin things out a bit": put a compressor after the delay on the send and trigger it from the dry bass (or the kick) through its sidechain input. some delays have it built in. switch on Ducking in Ableton's Echo and "the wet signal is proportionally reduced as long as there is an input signal." (wet means the echo, dry means the original.)
• widen the echo, keep the dry mono. spread the echo return out in stereo, but leave the dry bass dead centre. Sound On Sound warns that "many PAs sum low frequencies to mono", so anything wide down low can partly cancel out on a club system. the high-pass from step one takes care of that, because it stops "stereo modulation from compromising the bass's mono compatibility."
• automate it. the magic is restraint. instead of echoing every note, turn the send up on the last note of a phrase or a fill, and let the echo answer the bass before it gets out of the way.

which delay to use

any delay can do this: Ableton's Echo, the delay that came with your DAW, whatever's already in your project. the one we keep coming back to is EchoBoy by Soundtoys. it has "30 different echo styles", including models of the Space Echo, the Echoplex and the Memory Man, and lets you "control saturation, tape flutter and diffusion", which is exactly the grit a bassline loves. its groove controls let you "create echoes that rush or drag against the beat", so the repeats can swing with your track instead of sitting stiffly on the grid. it's not magic, just a delay with a lot of character. but on bass, that character is the whole point.

try this: three echo moves for your next bassline

• the last-note throw. keep the echo send at zero, then automate it up for the final bass note of every fourth bar. the tail rolls into the next phrase like a little fill.
• the breakdown bloom. when the kick drops out for a breakdown, lower the high-pass on the echo so its low end can roll around for a few bars. Mike Senior suggests exactly this for moments "where there's room in the arrangement for the lows to roll around unchecked". bring the filter back up before the kick returns.
• the stab answer. put the echo on a chord stab instead of the bass. the bass stays dry and tight, and the stab's echo fills the gaps. just don't echo both at once, or you'll fill every gap you worked so hard to make.

start with a bass worth echoing

echo flatters a great source and exposes a weak one. that's where bassBox comes in: 141 bass presets, each one played on real hardware (a Yamaha DX7II, a Roland Jupiter X, a Roland JV-1080 and an Oberheim OB-6) and recorded across 21 zones so it holds up from C1 to C5. it has its own tempo-synced ECHO with a TIME control for quick sketches, and a WIDTH knob that keeps the sub tight and centred while the top spreads out, which is the "widen the echo, keep the dry mono" rule built in. want to know why an FM bass pokes through a mix while an OB-6 growls? we broke down all four machines in four machines, one low end.

and for the stab that answers it, there's chordBox: 300 chords sampled from six hardware synths through a Neve 1073 and API 2500 chain, with its own reverb and delay built in, so the stab answer above is one knob away. pick a fat source, break the rule on purpose, and let the bass breathe. no rules, just bangers. press play. make a belter.

sources

• Mixing Bass (Sound On Sound)
• Side-chaining (Sound On Sound)
• New Harmonics (Sound On Sound)
• Low-End Theory: Exploring Eight Common Bassline Styles (Attack Magazine)
• Live Audio Effect Reference: Echo (Ableton)
• Delay (audio effect) (Wikipedia)
• Dotted note (Wikipedia)
• Roland Space Echo (Wikipedia)
• The Roland RE-201 Space Echo Story (Roland)
• EchoBoy (Soundtoys)