Psytrance bass

Tutorial by Fred e from kveaudio.com

many artist use the steiny VB1... here's a step by step how to make a fullon bass with cubase:

1. get a kick going in 145 bpm.

2. fire up VB1 set the plectrum position to far left, shaper = 0 and damper somwhere between 0 and 30. put a eq plug and quadrafuzz on it. leave them in initial setting for now.

3. draw 32th to 16th-lenght midi notes in between the kicks:
K b b b K b b b
I suggest a minor scale (F D# and E is common) now unless you are doing the single note dark thing, play around a bit with note pitches, octave jumps, velocities and note lengths (keep notes short) until you got something nice. Keeping the majority of the notes to your base key is usually a good idea... The bass line "melody" is seriously important and worth spending lots of time on. Here you may also want to add steiny midigate to the VB1 track, letting it mute the bass line on the kicks, to make sure the bass line does not collide with you kicks and / or to create a side chain effect.

4. finetune, envelope and if needed, eq+compress the kick to glue with the bass,

5. tweak the VB1 quadrafuzz and eq, cut some highs if you wish & pay attention to the mids. Some producers also cuts the very low part < 40 Hz to give the rest of the bass frequency band more room & energy.

6. Route VB1+kick to a group for easy mixing. Maybe compress, saturate, bass enhance with something like waves Rbass or whatever you may find cool sounding here.

7. Now comes the hard part... making a tune. Keep in mind that how your bass sounds in relation to the rest of your track is logically impossible to tell until you have created it. So start getting creative and revisit the bassline settings from time to time during your process.

If you don't want the VB1 sound, a good idea is to use kontakt 2, sample a sawtooth, setup flexible envelopes on amp and LP filter and keytracking for the filter. This setup usually works better than using synths bacuse of the precision control Kontakt2 gives you.

final tip: DON'T LOOPAZOID! countiusly tweaking while listening to a fullon bass line for half an hour will screw up your perception completely and the result will most definitely be bad. Work fast, rest your ears and listen to references.