If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably spend loads of time trying to discover why your tecfhno & tech house loops never sound quite as groovy as the pro’s. One thing you might be missing is a solid low-end groove. Today I will share a huge secret that will take your techy bass grooves to the next level.
Ready for the secret? Here it is: one of the easiest ways to make a groovy bassline is by picking just a few samples that work together, and playing around with the envelopes and the sample starts. A huge mistake that I personally made when I first started creating tech house loops was that I spent days trying to program a bass groove in a synthesizer.
While it is still possible to make a techy bassline this way, it is actually a LOT harder to get something good from a single synth than it is compared to using chopped up samples and loops.
An example
Let me show you a quick example to illustrate how easy it is to get these techy style single note bass patterns. I already have a tech house beat laid down, which we made earlier. This is what the drums sounds like:
Now for this technique to work, you have to select a few samples that work together. Start going through your sample library and find some interesting bass hits. You may not get a killer tech bass the first time, but you will get better at this over time. Consider this a practice run.
Here’s the bass samples that I chose for the purpose of this tutorial:
Now comes the fun part; we need to create a groovy pattern with these elements. Drag them into your sequencer and start messing around, shifting samples in time and adjusting the attack and release envelopes on the volume to get subtle changes to the groove.
After about 15 minutes of messing around, this is what we ended up with:
Processing
Alright, that’s our bassline finished. Pretty easy, right? But if we want to take this loop to the next level and get that pro quality, we have to further EQ and process these elements and make them sit together in the mix. Make sure to check out my kick & bass mixing tutorial if you want more tips on getting that fat punchy low-end in your track.
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