dHarry said:
Anyone know on a muso-technical level how grime/dubstep/drum and bass producers make all those mutant wormhole inside-out writhing wobble-U b-lines?
Apologies to the Mods if this is in the wrong place.
layering: take some interesting sounding b-line (i.e. lots of high-frequencies), but w/o too
many very low frequencies, don't make it too loud. at the same time add a pure sine-wave
playing the same notes as the interesting b-line, but tranposed down. the sine bass gives the
acoustic energy, but because it doesnt have harmonics it doesn't interfer with anything in the
mid and high freq. level. hence you can make it really loud (only tricky bit is with the
bass drum, turn the bass drum down when the sine bass is on or don't have the bass kicking
at that time, otherwise drum and sine will interfere). the acoustic effect is that it sounds like
the interesting bass has lots of energy when in fact it doesn't.
another very popular technique is to have two basslines playing in parallel, with the same
sound, but ever so slightly out of tune with each other. works particularly well when the
main bass frequency is triangular. i think alex reese, pulp fiction, was the first track to do
this really well.