Desolate Deep: Dark and Moving Basses – Creative use of Logic’s effects

In our final tutorial, we’re going to introduce some wobble and darkness to your basslines. If you like, you can use the same bass sound we started with a few pages back in the first tutorial. We’ll fatten it up with some distortion and add some wobble with an AutoFilter. This gives you the kind […]

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In our final tutorial, we’re going to introduce some wobble and darkness to your basslines. If you like, you can use the same bass sound we started with a few pages back in the first tutorial. We’ll fatten it up with some distortion and add some wobble with an AutoFilter. This gives you the kind of bass effect used in dubstep a few years back, but it’s also used in a variety of other current dance music genres.

Point Blank

The AutoFilter is a great, fun plug-in to experiment with and you can really get a lot of varied movement going, but keep it all in line with the tempo of whatever you’re working on. The Rate dial is your friend here and you can lock the movement into time and beats and bars. You can therefore have this modulating wobble effect firing rapidly once per bar, or over up to 32 bars if you like.

There is some great fun to be had with some of the other controls on AutoFilter and you can really turn what was a fairly dull bass into a moving, evolving analogue-type sound. With the Filter, Resonance and Filter type options that are available, we show you how you might also end up with screaming lead sounds, too –something that’s also possible from the Distortion plug-in, just demonstrating how useful and versatile these two plug-ins are when it comes to adding a dash of sonic creativity to your tracks.

We hope that this tutorial has given you a flavour of some of the more extreme and creative options that you can achieve using Logic’s suite of built-in plug-in effects and also shown you that using them can be as fun – and as versatile – as using any third-party plug-in instrument. For more Logic tips and tricks, check out our other tutorials here.

In the next tutorial, we’re going to introduce some wobble and darkness to your basslines. If you like, you can use the same bass sound we started with a few pages back in the first tutorial. We’ll fatten it up with some distortion and add some wobble with an AutoFilter. This gives you the kind of bass effect used in dubstep a few years back, but it’s also used in a variety of other current dance music genres.

The AutoFilter is a great, fun plug-in to experiment with and you can really get a lot of varied movement going, but keep it all in line with the tempo of whatever you’re working on. The Rate dial is your friend here and you can lock the movement into time and beats and bars. You can therefore have this modulating wobble effect firing rapidly once per bar, or over up to 32 bars if you like.

There is some great fun to be had with some of the other controls on AutoFilter and you can really turn what was a fairly dull bass into a moving, evolving analogue-type sound. With the Filter, Resonance and Filter type options that are available, we show you how you might also end up with screaming lead sounds, too –something that’s also possible from the Distortion plug-in, just demonstrating how useful and versatile these two plug-ins are when it comes to adding a dash of sonic creativity to your tracks.

We hope that this tutorial has given you a flavour of some of the more extreme and creative options that you can achieve using Logic’s suite of built-in plug-in effects and also shown you that using them can be as fun – and as versatile – as using any third-party plug-in instrument.

Dark and moving basses – A Step by Step Guide

1. Now we’re turning our attention back to bass sounds and going to explain how you can very quickly get dark and dirty in Logic. Load up a similar sound to the one we started with in the very first tutorial

2. You’ll need a bassline looping around to get the best from this, so feel free to use the same one from the Dirty Electronics tutorial, as we’ll start this one with similar effects

3. Load up the Distortion plug-in and set the Drive to 28dB. You’ll notice that the sound is already pretty big and has moved well away from its polite beginnings

4. Now we’ll get some movement going, so load the AutoFilter plug-in into the next slot. These two plug-ins work very well with each other. Set the Rate value on the AutoFilter to 1/2 for now

5. Now experiment with the Filter frequency dial (top right) and decide how you want your bass to sound. Using the Glide Surfer preset from Logic ES1; we settled on around 38% for the Filter.

6. Now introduce some wobble to your sound by increasing the Cutoff Modulation slider to around 40%. Instant dirty bass wobble, that should be in sync with your tempo.

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