



No bass, no fun

As high school kids, we first used to laugh at those stickers on tuning cars, yet some time later in my life I had to admit how little did we know and that the stickers were in fact straight on point! No bass is for me personally one of the most frequent reasons to turn down a submission. You don't have to have your bassline sounding like a jazz player playing his double bass in a smokey bar, a simple sine or triangle wave can be just fine, too. The bass notes can more or less copy the root notes of your chords. You shouldn't forget to make it mono and yes, it can be a pain in the ass to get it sitting just right in the mixdown, but is it a reason to just don't even try? There's literally a ton of tutorials on youtube how to make a good bassline for lofi, so don't be lazy and start turning those knobs!

Anyway, I figured out I could add a few tips on this topic too, so here we go. First, if you're struggling to get your bass heard on some speakers, you can add one more oscillator, tune it one octave above your first oscillator and then play a little bit with the loudness and filter frequency. Also, putting some saturation FX on the bass channel can help you to get the bass richer on harmonic frequencies - especially sine waves are poor on harmonic content (so you may actually rather want to use a triangle wave for your bass instead of a sine, if you don't want to have it sounding all clean). If you want to make the bass really gritty, distortion or overdrive (or a harsh saturation), then maybe a little bit of noise and a low pass filter (or a good EQ) will be your good friends. As I already mentioned, don't forget to make your bass mono and also don't forget to leave some space for the kick (either by EQing kick and bass to fit together or by applying some sidechaining). Actually, that's also a good idea for a paragraph!