In today's lesson I'm going to show you 12 techniques to spice up your bass lines and make them way more interesting than just following the root note of your chord. You can use all of these 12 techniques, you can use a combination of some of them or you can use none of them at all - it depends on the vibe that you're going for but it's a good idea to have these tools in your pack so you can use them if needs be. So, we're gonna go from a bass line like this and if we use all of these techniques we can end up with a bass line like this. Now, as I said, it might be inappropriate to use all of the tricks, you might just want to use number two, number six or maybe you want to use five, eight and nine but stick around and watch them all because then at least you've got them in your tool kit if and when you want to use them. Quick shout out to our Accelerator student Jack Parker, who joined us about a year and a half ago, really nervous, hadn't really finished any music and he's just had his latest track played on BBC radio, which is a huge win. I'm going to link to it below and I've got to say, hats off to you, Jack, you put the work in and got the results! Anyway, without further ado, let's hop into the DAW and I'm going to show you my 12 ways to spice up your bass patterns. Okay, so we're going to start out with the standard bass line that's just following the chord progression, which is kind of nice but we want to look at the different ways to spice it up. So, the first is to use my eighth shift technique and if we can see we've got our grid set to eighths so there are four beats in a bar one two three four and you can see the grid is double that resolution now if we move over the beginning of some of these notes by an eighth and let's just make sure there's only one playing at a time like this then it's going to push that groove forwards and listen to what happens when this bass note is coming just before the beat just keeps that groove going and you can actually push some of them back as well so i'm going to push this one back by 3 8 and then make this bass note reach it and now let's listen to what's happening just pushes that groove forward like way better okay on to my spicing up technique number two and that is adding syncopation now we're going to use 16 for this and this works particularly well with pluck bases rather than re-spaces so i'm just going to make this a bit shorter like this and what you can do is using the 16th grid you can just skip 2 16 each time like this so skip skip there skip skip there skip skip there skip skip there we can copy that for our other bass notes too so let's just take that down to the c and we can take it down to the a as well and you can combine these techniques as well you don't need to use just one or the other and let's just double that one up to there and then we're going to put these ones up here and now listen to the baseline we've added the sync patient to so it's just way funkier but again it depends on the genre that you are producing and the effects that you want to create but for this i would probably add a little bit of extra release just so these notes are a little bit longer so let's go to my volume envelope so it's a completely different vibe but that's a way to spice up your bass lines as well okay on to number three and that is separating the sub bass from the mid bass and there are a couple of reasons for that and it's more for processing than the actual spiciness but sometimes if your bass line goes really low like this let's just take it all down an octave like when we get down here we're losing a lot of that energy so if we split this into two different bases so i'm just going to duplicate that now for the mid bass what i'm going to do is turn off my sub oscillator i'm also going to put an eq rolling off the low end under about 120 hertz so that means the sub bass isn't going to be doubled up so now our main bass sounds like this and there's actually some phase cancellation but if we take out the low end and have a separate sub base track like this that doesn't matter so much because it's only when the sub frequencies phase cancel each other that the problems really start to arise in the baseline because it just drops in volume and energy and we want that really nice solid sub base so if we've separated out like this i'm just going to take off that little bit of bass reverb open up that version of serum now i'm going to turn off the other oscillators and just leave the sub oscillator so now we've got this effect but here is where we're losing energy with the sub bass now not only do you not run into the phase cancellation issues if you've got a nice mono sub bass we can also bump them up an octave if needs be if it goes down really low and we're losing that sub power we can just notch this up an octave and we're going to leave our mid bass playing what it was so that's impossible if you've got the bass line all in one instrument and now let's listen to our bass with our sub bass it's going to jump up here so now let's just do a comparison so this is the lowest bass point that we have and now we've got the sub bass and the mid bass separated out so i'm just going to turn off the sub bass and then go back to having the sub bass within the main bass listen to that so for comparison now listen to the power so that's why separating out your sub bass is great and i recommend it to everyone okay for my next tip i have reverted back to our original bass line and i've added in the chords of the track as well so let's have a listen to it at the moment so our baseline follows the root notes of the chords perfectly but we don't have to do that we can spice things up a bit and again it depends on the genre and the vibe that you're trying to create but it's worth experimenting with and this is something that calvin harris is superb at and it just creates a funky vibe so as i said you don't have to use the root of the track and the easiest way to do this is to use this scale button in whatever DAW you're using there's usually something similar put in whichever scale you're in and this tracks in e minor natural and then you can press the scale button and then it's going to give you a template and when you are experimenting with notes that aren't the root note of the chord thirds fifths and sevenths are usually good places to try experimenting with so so that's the third let's try this last one instead of the b which is the root of the chord we're gonna go to the f sharp so now let's listen to the vibe so it adds a little bit of kind of this a little bit of discomfort or a little bit of tension is probably a better word and it can create a really nice jazzy feel so that's my next tip number four number five we are going to move on to the 80 20 rule and this is something i got from the guys at hook theory i just like the way that they explained it and it's moving away from the root note of the chord but using a particular ratio because if the note doesn't hit the root enough or the bass doesn't underpin the track enough it can get confusing and the listener doesn't really know what's going on and if you've got a melody as well if you've got too much interest in the bass line that can take away from the melody so if we go back to the root notes like this if we want to use this 80 20 rule and move away from the root note we can add some interest and again this works for different styles but this can be quite good if you're creating a funky style so i'm just going to create a bit of a funky riff and again i'm working on the 16th so i'm adding the syncopation we looked at earlier but i'm also moving away from the root note now so we're kind of combining them so we've got 80 here on the route and then we're moving off the route for 20 and that's still going to give us enough power or enough root note to keep it locked in let's try this i'm just going to fast forward this bit and then i'm going to copy that same pattern as well just to keep things recognizable i'll turn off the lfo tool as well so we can really hear it now we're going to keep developing this idea out and now we're going to add the octave jump in as well and if you are creating a funkier bass line this can really just add interest just by dropping or raising notes an octave like so so again it depends on which genre you're producing but that's a nice way to spice up your base patterns as well okay on to the next which is tweaking the note length so if we make this all legato all of these notes are going to be completely running into each other like so which is absolutely fine but sometimes just tweaking that where the note end happens can just add a little bit of extra funk or a little bit of it extra interest which can be really important to creating the vibe because it's what you don't include that's as important as what you do include when it comes to music so if we want this to be a little funky bit here so we're leaving little gaps in between some of the notes and we can follow those patterns as well and just copy them into the second half for continuity because again continuity is important and repetition of pattern so people don't get overwhelmed by just completely random notes basically so now let's listen to it now we've tweaked some of these notes ends even the ones that are really close together like this we can just tweak them a tiny bit they don't have to be much of a shortened length but just that tiny bit of space can add just what you need and with the chords so for this bass line and i'm kind of going off on one here what i'm actually going to do is i'm just going to double this up and i'm going to call this funky base because i think we need something with a bit more staccato to it so this is kind of a lesson on layering and you can check out my video on layering that's just popping up now but what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to contact and this is a bonus bit i might even edit this out but who knows this is what happens here i kind of go off on one let me know if you're enjoying it so far guys give me a hell yeah or an ah man brother if you are feeling holy okay i'm gonna go and i'm gonna get the rickenbacker bass because it's rick and back a badass uh so let's just get this on there and i'm gonna just layer this in really quietly this is it on its own i'm going to put this up an octave though and i'm going to take out the low end because it's just that texture i want okay let's try now anyway that's a little bit of bonus layering there so i'll take that off for the next tip which is to do adding flourishes so we've kind of already done this because we funked things up but if we go back to our original baseline if you do have a respace you obviously don't want to overdo the you know the flourishes because it's going to reduce that vibe that you're going for so if we go back to the original vibe it was something more along these lines but if we wanted to just add a bit of that funky flourish let's double up this length and we're just going to add it on the second eighth the second time it loops around so then it might sound more like this but rather than just looping exactly the same we're gonna have that little face flourish in there and you can have it at the end as well so that is how you can spice things up as well okay on to the next and that is using envelopes so again this is more of the sound rather than the pattern itself but if you wanted to make things a bit more interesting you can tweak the envelope in your base so it's not the same every time so if we create a filter envelope on this baseline let's just solo it so it sounds like this we've already got a bass envelope there actually but i'm just gonna increase the attack on this uh okay we've already got an lfo applied so i'm just gonna remove that so i've just added that envelope to open up that filter which creates that effect but we don't have to have that same envelope on every beat if we want to just add more dynamicism to the track we could open we could drag an lfo and apply that to the attack on that envelope and just have it gently tweak it as that so every base hit has a slightly different envelope so that's just another way to spice things up okay now on to the eight bar switch so if we've got our four bar loop and it just runs through as we've already shown here we can change things in the second part of the loop in the second section just to make things more interesting but not only can we add these flower flourishes sorry we could also use what we used earlier which was not hitting that root note so now we've got our baseline that runs through but then the second time the second note of that bass line doesn't hit the root note of the chord we are jumping up to i believe it was the fifth of that chord as we looked at earlier so now let's listen to it just following the route notes so that adds some more interest but now i want to change this bit just because i get i've got the vibes it's just a little run down there yes i love that okay on to the next and this is the pitch bend so we're almost there but this one is really cool as well and again it doesn't matter which genre you're well it does matter which genre you're producing but it's really about which vibe you want now this is just adding pitch bend to add more movement to your bass now what i would always recommend that you do is in whatever instrument you're using for your bass change the pitch bend range to be plus 12 and minus 12. and that means whenever you do a full pitch bend it's going to be exactly one octave that you bend either up or down and that's going to avoid your bass kind of sounding out of tube so if we open up our envelope here and choose midi control pitch bend let's see what happens or rather here what happens when we just add these little pitch bends now and again listen how much more interesting that sounds straight away and then we'll pitch bend up here an octave now you don't have to use it this much you might just have one pitch bend or you might have no pitch bends but it's just an option to add more interest to your track so nice okay on to the next and this is cool and response and this is particularly good if you are producing something like trance 2.0 for anjuna beats something where there's two different bass lines but the trouble with two different bass lines is sometimes they can clash with each other so in this example what we're going to do is just have these bass lines kind of switch out and we're going to have two so we've got these bass notes so what we're going to do is create a second bass the second base patch and i'm just gonna go for a random one i'm gonna go for spire and see what base patches they have in there let's just find something interesting i don't have my keyboard set up so we're just gonna have to hope that sounds kind of good and then we'll open up our midi and have a listen okay cool so we're going to use that quite aggressive sound and remember we're using the techniques that we were looking at all through this exercise but now we're gonna add a second base now when you have something like that this is when we need to make sure that we don't have both bases playing at the same time because then it can add too much build up in the low end so we can zoom in and we can just cut it out like this for that bit of bass but then we need to make this sure this one triggers so let's have a listen yeah but then we need to make sure this base note actually triggers again like so and we can duplicate that base and what we're going to do is cut this one out and then just leave that one different bass note there and this is when you get all that glitchy stuff when you're listening to modern trance which can sound really cool but we're just gonna find a different base again we want something quite plucky i don't know what this will sound like bit of a reverse bass that sounds cool actually so we're going to leave that one there like this take this one out cool let's find a different one for that here we go yeah that's cool so now we've got these three different bases and if we continue this throughout the whole pattern they're going to kind of talk to each other in a call and response type effect but let's just loop this bit and hear what it sounds like that's cool so we're not over complicating the trap by having multiple bases all playing at the same time we're just kind of cool and responsible chopping between them so yeah there are some of my best techniques for switching up your bass line for spicing things up and making things more interesting than just following the root notes of your chords which can be a bit boring sometimes so i hope you enjoyed that and yeah thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed it please subscribe to my channel and like this video really helps me out and thank you for watching till next time cheers and happy producing you