5 Tips for a Great Electric Bass Sound | Cubase Secrets with Dom

hello everyone dom here and in this video i'm going to give you five tips for getting a great electric bass sound so in this video we're going to talk about electric bass and how you can get a great electric bass sound with the tools that we have in cubase so today i'm going to show you quite a few techniques that you can utilize when you're mixing or when you're producing electric bass now bass is a very important instrument and it's basically along with the kick drum the foundation of your track so you should make sure that your bass sits well in the mix it's even it's compact and it doesn't fluctuate because you want your low end to be consistent so let's start with tip number one which is of course compression most of the times when you're dealing with electric bass you will need to compress it because like i said you need to make sure that your low end and the base is your low end in the track is consistent throughout the truck you don't want your low end to go up and down in volume because this will make your track sound unstable your groove is going to suffer all these things so one of my favorite compressors for bass in cubase is the vintage compressor and the great thing with the vintage compressor is that you can use it straight up as a compressor but you can also use it as a parallel compressor so let's have a listen to this track dry and then we can start introducing the compression [Music] and the bass sounds nice but there's quite a bit of ups and downs when it comes to volume we need to make sure that we even this out so let's introduce the vintage compressor and as you can see i have a relatively fast attack but i have the punch activated which will give us a punchy sound for our base and i also have a fast release ratio is 81 and right now i have it all the way to wet and we're using it as a straight up [Music] compressor [Music] now as you can hear the bass acquired a lot of punch and also it gives it a more funky quality because we've activated the punch okay so let me play this in isolation and let's hear how it sounds with and without the compressor [Music] so without the compressor it sounds a little bit more soft a little bit more fluffy but when we add the compressor we get this nice punch you know like the bass player played it with a little bit more attack right so this is what you can do with the vintage compressor now if you don't want this effect to be so obvious you can just lower the mix and favor the dry sound instead let's have a listen [Music] so what i'm doing here is i'm using parallel compression so i'm keeping the dry signal to let all these dynamics come through but i'm also compressing quite a bit and getting a little bit of extra punch from the compressor because this is a colorful compressor now tip number two is eq and dynamic eq let me show you an example of what i have here here i'm using frequency 2 to process my bass sound and let me explain a little bit what i'm doing here so as you can see i'm adding a little bit of low end and this is pretty much what most people do when they start treating their bass they immediately reach out for the low end which is understandable but it's not enough with bass one of the most important things is the mid-range as well why because low end will give you the body of the bass but the mid-range will give you the notes it will give you the presence it will make your bass cut through it will make your bass sync so let me show you what i'm doing here i'm adding a little bit of low end here and this is band 3 and i'm using this with a dynamic eq so this will give me a little bit of extra punch with band 4 i'm removing some of the honkiness with band 7 i'm adding a little bit of mid-range and this is basically where the bass sing and this is where we're going to hear the notes in the context of the track and i'm removing a little bit of the pick sound you know the string noises and all these things and this i'm doing with band 5 with a dynamic eq so let's have a listen and i'm going to activate each band one by one okay so bad number one i have a filter very mild at 38 hertz let's go to band number three now i'm going to exaggerate [Music] so what i'm doing here is i'm adding a dynamic eq so whenever we have the notes hitting we get a nice boost at around 100 hertz it depends on your bass but the other secret is have a very fast attack and a very fast release so it sounds more percussive so i can get a little bit more attack now let's hear what band number four does like i said this removes some of the honkiness now let's go to one of the most important things and this is what band number seven does here in my opinion and this is basically adding mid-range okay let's have a listen you will see how much of a difference this will make [Music] so this makes the notes really really clear and of course it depends on what kind of music you're going to mix but i'm showing you all the different techniques here now let's activate band number five and this will basically tame those noises from the strings okay let's have a listen in isolation [Music] and these noises you might want to keep them or you might want to remove them depending on the style of music that you're creating but for this type of track i think they're a little bit distracting so i'm trying to tame them using dynamic eq why dynamic and not static normal eq because i don't want the bass to lose its presence i want these noises to be tamed only when they hit okay so let's listen to what frequency does as a whole with and without [Music] [Music] and you can hear when i remove this it sounds a little bit more muffled we're not really sure what kind of notes the bass plays especially when we have an electric piano when we have guitars the bass needs to cut through and the way for the bass to cut through is by taking care of your mid range not the low end and to add up to this i'm going to move on to tip number three which is adding saturation distortion and also amp simulation i'm going to use one of my favorite plugins for bass which is magneto okay let's have a listen and let's hear how this plugin will make the sound come alive [Music] and you can hear how much weight it adds to the sound the low end the low mids they are more focused now they're more pronounced but what i'm also doing here is i'm removing the top end using the high frequency adjust here so i'm activating it and removing the top end because i want the base to be more compact and i want the base to not necessarily have all these noises there so this is a very nice way to tame those in a silky way okay let's have a listen dual mode sounds very very nice as well now let me go ahead and add another saturation plugin which is the tube okay i'm going to turn down the mix and let's listen to how it sounds [Music] and again all these different saturation plugins what they do is they enhance not only the low end but also the mids they add more harmonics and more harmonics means a more intelligible bass line you will hear the notes even more when you add these harmonics because low end won't give you too much information about the notes but harmonics will give you this kind of information and the last thing i'm going to show you for this is of course the amp simulation and in cubase we have the vst base amp which can give you a very very nice bass sound there's a range of amps that you can choose from and sometimes what i like to do is i like to use this as a send effect so i'm sending it to an effects channel and then i'm blending it in with the di sound which also sounds great but in this case let's just use it straight up on the channel and let's see the kind of summer we get [Music] [Music] and there are so many different bass sounds that you can get out of the vst bass um like i said try and use it in parallel especially with the low end the vst base amp can give you some incredible tones tip number four is very important and if you're serious about bass you should definitely have a look at this and try it out and that's cleaning up and tightening the base rhythmically let me show you what i mean [Music] now it's very important for the base to lock very well with the kick drum and the drums in general sometimes this might not be the case a very good bass player will know how to lock with the kick drum and the drums and the groove but sometimes you might have a little bit more of a loose performance so what do you do then even if you have a great performance it's actually worth checking out this so let me show you what i would do is i would open this base track and depending on the track i would see if everything is locked on the grid let's have a listen [Music] the first thing that you can do of course is you can hit q and if you have audio warp activated right here your base is going to be quantized and this will do most of the work for you but then if you feel that something is not right because bass is a very complex instrument there are many sounds there's the pick noise there are a lot of things that are going on that might make the quantize process become a little bit more complex what i would totally do is i would go ahead and start manually editing the timing of my base to make sure that it locks exactly with the groove so in order to do this you just go to your sample editor you go to audio warp and then you go to free warp and then you can start moving the notes around okay so for example like this if i feel that this shouldn't be there this hit point i can just hit alt and just delete it and now i can just have a listen listen to the entire bass track and see if everything sounds nice and tight to the groove [Music] for example this one i might need to help it a little bit maybe i want to make it a little bit before you know maybe like this [Music] this one again see it's a little bit off maybe i want to just correct this a little bit like this [Music] and most of the times you will find that audio work will do a pretty good job but i would always double check with bass because it's a very important instrument and if something is off then your track is going to sound bad now in this case i don't think i need to quantize too much but the one thing that i would do is i would start cleaning up the base okay i will start cleaning up the audio and when i say clean up i mean i would go into these you know silences between the notes and let's see if i zoom in you will see that there's quite a bit of dirt there now depending on the music genre this might be fine so don't clinically clean up your base but in this case because the track is very groovy i want these silences to be real silences so of course there are many ways to do this automatically in cubase you can use the detect silence option or you can use a gate but if you ask me i would always opt to do this manually because i want to make the choices myself so what i'm doing here and my process is i'm taking i'm selecting the portion that i want and then i go audio process and then i'm replacing this highlighted portion with silence now of course if you're going to do this many times it helps if you set up a shortcut and my shortcut is shift and space so let me show you how i do this i just highlight this section and make sure that you have snap to zero crossing activated and all your cuts are going to be super smooth cubase is really really good with this so shift and space and let's have a listen now this i don't need this this i might want to keep because it's part of the groove but this i might want to get rid of it and i'm cleaning up the base you have no idea how much headroom and how much more tight the sound will be when you do this when you take your time and do this like that maybe this one as well you know i want this to be a real silence same here see even though i'm cutting here it always sounds smooth you don't hear any clicks and it pops because cubase does everything for you maybe this one as well i don't want that i don't want that let's see [Music] yeah this can go absolutely [Music] and because i have snap to zero crossing activated it doesn't allow me to go to any place that doesn't have a zero crossing so i think you get the point base is a very important element of your mix it's the foundation of your mix so i would really take care of it like i would do with vocals for example so i would spend a little bit of time and give it some love clean it up you don't have to be clinical about it all the times but if you're looking for a very tight sound this will pay off and the final tip i want to share with you today is a very powerful technique if you want to fatten up an electric bass and that's duplicating your electric bass line with a sub bass now if you're a good keyboard player you can of course play the bass line on your keyboard and you're good to go but if you're not all you need to do is just create a retrolog instance as you can see here i just have a sign oscillator nothing special and then all you need to do is double click on your base and go to vary audio and then just activate vary audio like this and as you can see now we have all the base notes right there and now all we need to do is select my retrolog here and go to functions and select extract midi and once you do this this dialog will pop up depending on what kind of playing you have on your baseline you might want to experiment with these different options in this case i'm going to go for nodes and static pitch bend data and then what i need to do is for destination select first select the track which will be a retro log hit okay and there we go now we have our midi notes for our sub bass and as you can see now i have the midi notes and i can support my electric bass sound with a nice thick sub bass and this ties very well with the previous trick the more you clean up and you tighten up your base rhythmically but also all these different silences you will get a better result with your midi when you transform your bass notes into midi of course you might need to edit the media a little bit but most of the job will be done now let me play this and i'm going to blend the sub bass in and you will see the difference that it makes to the sound [Music] and you can add as much as you want but this is basically a sub baseline that we can now open retrolog and we can do whatever we want to this sound okay so this can be a sub bass [Music] i can add distortion or you can turn this into a funky synth bass line [Music] so sky's the limit when you turn your bass into midi notes it's really powerful it opens a lot of options so we could go on forever talking about different things that you can do to get a great bass sound but these are five really solid tips that you can use five solid techniques that will give you a great bass stone that will cut through the mix so i hope you enjoyed this and i'll see you the next one bye [Music] you

Channel: Cubase

Views: 25,185

Keywords: mixing, production, music production, producing an electric bass, electric bass sound production, great electric bass sound, Dom Sigalas, producing with Cubase, how to make your electric bass sound great, music production techniques, how to properly mix a bass in your song, compression, EQ, sound dynamics, apms, VST Bass amp, gain, DAW, tightening bass rhythmically

Id: vneiDlLxdO4

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021