808 Bass Lines: Super Neat Beat Cheat Sheet Video Lecture - Reason Tutorials: The Ultimate Guide - Video & Sound Editing

Alright let’s talk about 808 Bass lines…
It’s a topic so simple and yet so complex
that we’ll be tackling it in a two part
series.
Today in part one let’s go from the basics
all the way up to a pretty awesome 808 Bass line.
But let’s start by defining what exactly
we mean when we say 808 Bass lines.
Originally, the kick drum of the 808 drum
machine was loved by early hip hop producers
for its… well perhaps Adrock from the Beastie
Boys can tell you…
The 808 BOOOOM.
Precisely.
And by the 90s, 808 Kick drums were being
loaded into samplers, distorted, and as is
the natural tendency of samplers… they were
being pitched up and down.
Suddenly we have the origins of the 808 Bass
line.
By the time 808 Basses became a defining staple
of Trap music, most of them had evolved from
relying on the long decay of an 808 sample
to being created using modern synths and plugins.
Recently we met up with Key Wane, a multi-platinum
grammy nominated producer who’s 808 basses
can be found on hits by Beyoncé, Drake, Ariana
Grande, Big Sean and many more.
And his go-to 808 Bass method is pretty straight
forward.
“They have a sub in Reason that sounds like
a kick by itself, so when you put a kick on
top of it… it hits even harder.
It’s called the Dirty South Sub.
Then I tweak that shit usually with the Scream.
It brings the color out.”
That’s it… a Reason factory synth preset
run through a slightly modified Reason distortion
preset.
If it’s good enough for Beyonce, it’s
probably good enough for us.
Today, while we dive deeper into sound design
and making a custom 808 Bass instrument…
Don’t lose sight of the fact that as complex
as 808 basses can be, they can also be simple
if that works for you.
Our beat here is in the style of the current
pop/trap crossover sound we hear so much of
these days.
Obviously it sounds thin now because it’s
lacking the bass.
So let’s start with an empty combinator
which will house all the devices which make
up our sound.
Now it’s good practice to immediately drag
in a Line Mixer so we can blend the instruments
or effects we include.
While 808 basses originally came from kick
drum samples, nowadays the standard convention
is to treat the attack punch of the kick and
the tonal sustain of the bass as two separate
entities.
For the tonal sustain, let’s actually
start the exact same way Key Wane does.
I’ll do a search for Dirty South to find
the Subtractor patch he was using in the Factory
Sounds and I’ll drag it into my Combinator
underneath the Mixer.
Our sound is off to a good start.
In fact, the only change I want to make right
now is to reduce the Release slider so that
our sub bass doesn’t ring out so much when
we release the key.
If we were to look at our sub tone in the
Spectrum EQ Window we can see that our bass
has loads of the fundamental frequency, but
it lacks any upper harmonics that will actually
help our tone cut through our mix and work
on smaller speakers.
We can enhance and even create upper harmonics
using saturation.
I’ll drag a Pulverizer under my Subtractor
and right click to reset it.
Now as I sustain a note and dial up the Dirt
you can hear and see the harmonics appear
in our tone.
I’ll add a little squash to even out the
balance of the fundamental and the harmonic
frequencies.
So now we have harmonics, but let’s continue
to color our sound with even more saturation.
The process of sound design when it comes
to 808 basses is often experimenting with
different types of distortion and saturation
to sculpt your sound.
So let’s bring in another type of saturation,
from Scream 4, which we’ll right click and
reset to its default also.
I can try any of Scream’s distortion types…
but I like the hollow sound of its Tape saturation.
In fact we can use the 3 band EQ to create
even more of that mid scoop.
You know what goes great with all this saturation?
More saturation!
Softube makes a great simple saturation knob
and perhaps best of all, it’s a free download
in the Propellerhead shop.
Let’s drag that in and dial up some more
low frequency growl.
That’s sounding nice.
I’ll finish it off by adding an Audiomatic
Retro Transformer to boost the bottom end
and scoop some more of those mid frequencies.
And we now have a nice dirty 808 sub frequency
tone.
But remember - 808 basses have their roots
in kick drums and what we’re lacking in
our sound is the punchy attack transient…
One very obvious way make our attack sound
like an 808 kick drum is to use an 808 kick
drum so let’s drag a Kong Drum Designer
in just below our mixer and it will automatically
route itself to our second channel.
And as before, I’ll right click and reset
to clear out the default patch.
There are tons of 808 samples in Reason’s
Factory Sounds when we search for 808…But
I’m interested in a bass drum with a sharp
attack to add punch to my sub tone.
If I scroll down you’ll notice one sample
called “808 Bass Drum Sharp Attack”.
That has ALL the things I want so let’s
drag it onto our first pad.
But if we play some notes you’ll notice
a problem.
On Kong, pads are assigned to specific MIDI
notes but we don’t want Kong playing other
pads.
The first step is to make sure Kong doesn’t
respond to all those different MIDI notes.
By expanding the Programmer area, we can select
the devices inside our Combinator and make
changes to their individual behavior.
In this case, we’ll select our Kong and
disable Receive Notes.
Now my Kong pads don’t trigger when I play
MIDI notes.
But what we really want is for Kong to trigger
one specific pad from every incoming note.
We can do that using a simple MIDI to CV Gate
converter… sound complicated?
It’s really not.
Follow along and I’ll show you what I mean…
In our Utilities section we’ll drag in an
RPG-8 Monophonic Arpeggiator into our rack
above Kong.
If you’re already wondering what an Arpeggiator
is doing on a kick drum, don’t worry.
The RPG-8 actually has two core functions.
The obvious one is that it’s an arpeggiator,
which you can tell from the name.
But we’re not interested in its Arpeggiator.
In fact our first step is to turn off the
Arpeggiator.
We’ll be focusing on this side of the RPG-8
and that’s its second core function: A MIDI
to CV converter.
The RPG-8 is a wonderful bridge between the
human world of MIDI notes we play on our keyboard
and the modular world on the back of Reason’s
rack.
If we press the Tab key to flip the rack you’ll
see that so far all the modular audio cabling
has been done automatically for us, which
is great… but now we want to wire our own
cable between the RPG-8 and our Kong that
will take any MIDI note received by the RPG-8
and send it to our Kong in what’s called
a gate trigger.
A gate is a simple electrical pulse which
travels down our cable and triggers our pad
in Kong.
It’s as simple as dragging a cable from
from RPG-8’s “Gate Out CV” to Pad 1’s
Gate In jack.
Now whichever key I press will send
a trigger pulse to our Kong pad with our kick
drum sample.
If we mute our sub frequencies we can hear
the solo punch of our kick drum.
Lets now balance our two channel volumes we
can hear both elements clearly, the attack
punch and the sustained sub harmonics.
That sounds about right to me.
Congratulations.
You’ve just designed a custom 808 Bass.
Now let’s get down to using it.
You’ve probably almost forgotten our beat
by now, right?
Remember this?
Let’s add some dirty 808 bass.
Now 808 Bass lines are nothing if not experimental…
to apply a fixed set of rules to them is to
betray the essence of 808 bass, so please
don’t take this stuff as gospel… but to
help get you started let’s consider some
strategies.
First of all, 808 Basses work well with empty
space.
You don’t have to fill every available beat
with music.
In fact the absence of the bass can make it
feel that much heavier when it comes in again.
I’m going to record a foundation part that
is simply the root notes of the chords on
the first beat of each bar, but releasing
in time for the trap snare to hit on the second
beat.
Let’s fill it out a bit more now with non-binding
non-gospel rule number 2…
808 Bass Lines like to play off what’s called
Perfect Intervals.
That means note intervals like the Root - 4th
- 5th - and the Octave in our scale.
Any guitarists out there will recognize these
intervals from so-called power chords because
they sound big and powerful.
I want to remember to keep my bass line sparse
but let’s fill in some perfect intervals
leading into each note.
While I’m doing that, I’ll show you on
screen the perfect intervals between the notes…
Our final adjustment to our bass line today
will be non-binding non-gospel rule number
3…
808 Bass lines like to do pitch dives.
You’ll often hear the pitch of 808 Basses
swooping up or down in big jumps.
You might find you prefer to do these live
while you record, but we can also draw them
in as pitch automation after the fact.
First though, I want to jump in and make one
more change to my Sub frequency synth.
I’ll change the pitch bend range from 7
to 12, giving me a full octave range to to
move up or down.
The first note that leads into a chord change
is this one.
Beneath it I’ll draw in a fairly simple
pitch dive…
I’ll turn off snap to let me position my
automation points wherever I want.
It takes three points to make this work.
There’s the point where my dive starts,
which I want to come a little after the note
has had time to sound… then there’s the
end of the dive which can come at the end
of my note’s duration and will be all the
way at the bottom of the my pitch bend range…
and then there’s the third point that returns
my pitch bend back to zero for the next note.
And it sounds like this.
I can repeat that process for the other leading
notes or I can even just lasso the automation
I’ve already made, hold down option on a
mac or control on Windows, then click and
drag to duplicate those automation points.
But since the next note is shorter, I’ll
want to move these points backwards so my
dive ends on time.
And we’ll do the same thing for our next
leading note.
The last three notes happen so quickly that
we don’t have time to dive them.
We’ll just leave them alone.
But the first note could get a different type
of dive.
Let’s chop it in half, and we’ll move
the latter half up a perfect octave.
And let’s dive that note back down.
So you can see… the process of creating
808 basses now enters the realm of experimentation.
In other words, it’s up to you to try what
you like.
But we’ve created a really nice dirty sub
harmonically rich 808 Bass from scratch.
Feel free to make your own using different
devices and see how they turn out.
In fact, the approach to 808 Basses is so
varied and so popular in modern styles that
we’ll be revisiting this topic in a two
part sequel to this tutorial.
Next time we’re going to get even more advanced
and make a refined sounding 808 bass that
you’re going to love.
Here’s just a little taste of what we’ll
be doing…
Trust me you’ll want to tune in.