By SiKo

Since I like to start with a bass and a kick, here’s how I learned to do it.

Download the song file (You will need this)

Rack preparation
Between the Hardware interface and your (first) mixer place an MClass mastering unit (default one is fine for now).

To get the sound of a pumping and grooving bass/kick combination, I use the kick to duck the bass signal and the combination of the kick and the bass to duck the shadow mixer (leads, samples, ‘the rest’)

I made a combinator patch to set-up the mixers needed. Load this into a combinator:

The kick
I connected the kick to the small (line) mixer.

If you are wondering how I made the kick:

In this song I used a sample. (Found a bunch on forum.isratrance.com, check it out!). Also possible is to use a subtractor or maelstrom to create a kick. A lot of good patches are shipping in the PsyCrafter vol. 1 refill which is very nice if you need good leads, fx and synths for your (psychedelic trance) tracks.

In general it’s more efficient and maintainable to keep things in combinators, so here’s the kick combi:

and the back of the rack:

As you can see, I split the kick audio signal and route one copy into the vocoder’s carrier inputs and one copy of the signal into the modulator input. This allows me to EQ the sound, shift the sound and mix it (via dry/wet) with the original kick sound to get the sound I want. Also I changed the velocity amount (less) on the redrum so we get an equal powered kick no matter the velocity and in this case I changed the length of the sample because the kick sound had a funny sounding tail. (This is just an example emphasizing the modulation possibilities you have for modulating the sound =f the kick).

After comes another EQ to find the nice spot in the kick to emphasize.

The bass
Ok, on to the bass:

Again, you can use samples (The disco bass patch in the FSB is a nice one for psy basses or use subtractor, malstrom or thor.)

I use a malstrom bass from the aforementioned refill. Same tuning tricks apply: vocoder (shaping the sound) and in the case of a synth bass, I use a compressor as well. (Anyway a compressor on the bass is a nice idea, just listen, don’t just follow what I or others are saying J)

To get the machine going

With some smart midi notes (a lot of info to be found in the istratrance forums), it already starts to sound nice together with the kick

But we’re not done!

First of all, to complete the kick/bass combi sound, we want the bass to be ducked by the kick, in order to find that grooving/pumping sound.

Side chaining is the word and I made a combinator to hook up the kick and bass so that you can side chain compress the bass with the kick.

(Sometimes when your bass is velocity sensitive, and pencil/record smart notes, side chaining will not have the most dramatic effect … but it never hurts when done subtly).

The finishing touch

And now for final tuning and mixing: ReGroove!

On sequenced notes (and unfortunately not on matrix and arpeggiator generated notes) you can apply groove templates that alter

- timing (following the chosen template)

- velocity (idem)

- length of the midi notes (idem)

- relative position to the rigid grid

The ReGroove mixer can shuffle the notes as well!

Great on drums, but also on bass … give it a try, and check the .rns where I did just that.

I hope this was interesting to you. Since I don’t have a professional audio background, I might have made mistakes, misassumptions or whatever. So if you think you might add or correct to this post, please don’t hesitate!

Happy grooving, boom out,

SiKo