We present five easy ways to fatten up your bass lines in Studio One.
If you are looking for the zone where groove, heart and harmony tie together, bass is the place. Although getting an acceptable bass sound is not terribly hard, getting a truly satisfying bass sound can be tricky. Low end is always hard to manage well, and the frequencies where bass articulation comes through fall in a mid-range already crowded with vocals, guitars and snare drums. Sometimes bass needs a little something extra to fulfil its multifaceted mission to hold down, propel, blend and support a song.
This month, I will flash before your eyes five Studio One-based methods of making a bass sound bigger, dirtier, warmer and/or just plain awesomer — and next month I’ll show you five more. I used a bass sound on the Presence virtual instrument for my examples, partly because Presence has built-in facilities that work for most of these methods. But these ideas are easily adaptable to other plug-ins.
First, a word of warning: a conservative approach to bass processing is in order most of the time, because it is easy to lose definition, low-frequency energy and pitch anchoring from a bass when a heavy hand is used. Yes, there are times when more is more, but not often will they be when processing bass.
Enough caution, let’s go!
A Chorus (Bass) Line
Chorus is the classic bass treatment. It thickens, adds just a bit of pitch wobble, and spreads into stereo.
In Screen 1, chorusing is applied in the FX section of Presence.
Screen 1: Studio One’s Presence instrument with the onboard effects displayed. Chorusing is being applied quite lightly. The basic delay time for the chorus is set to 24ms, in the middle of the range for chorusing delays, but long enough to cause some serious detuning if chorusing modulation is too heavy. Note that the Width is set very low to avoid this problem, as well as to keep the stereo image from being too wide. (For sparse, spacey stuff, wide stereo can be fun, but many other applications benefit from a less extreme stereo image for the bass.) The LFO rate is well under 1Hz; fast LFO rates make the bass sound like it’s going through a Leslie cabinet, which does work nicely, but only occasionally.
Unsurprisingly, Studio One’s Chorus plug-in also works great for chorused bass.
Micro Management
Another all-time classic technique is micro-shifting: widening a mono image into stereo by using complementary, very small pitch shifts of the signal, panned left and right. Usually, short delays are added to each side as well; up to a point, longer delay produces a wider signal.
SoundToys make a dedicated micro-shifting plug-in called Microshift, and there are plenty of generic pitch-shifter plug-ins that can be set up to do this. However, for this column I like to rely on bundled and/or free plug-ins as much as possible, and there is no bundled pitch-shifter with Studio One, so I went a different way in this example. I started by using the same Instrument track playing the Presence bass patch as in the chorus example. Then I followed these steps:
- Choose Event / Bounce to New Track. This produces a new audio track of the bass in addition to the existing Instrument track with MIDI.
- Choose Track / Duplicate with Events to make an exact copy of the new audio track. That gives me three tracks, as you see in Screen 2.
Screen 2: An instrument track playing Presence, plus two audio tracks created by bouncing the instrument track. - In the mixer, pan one of the audio tracks left and the other right, to the desired stereo width.
- Select the audio event on one of the two bounced tracks.
- In the Event Info area, set the Tune field to a small value, such as the 4 cents shown in Screen 3.
Screen 3: Settings for one channel of micro-shifting. The other channel would set Tune to a negative value and (usually, but not inevitably) Delay to a different value. - Set the Delay field in the Track Info area to a short delay, such as the 8ms shown.
- Select the audio event on the other bounced track, and set the Tune field for it to -4 cents. Then apply a different short delay value (an interesting thing you can do in Studio One is offset the second track forward in time by setting Delay to a negative value).
- Using the faders, mix the original Instrument track and the two audio copies to taste.
Amp It Up
Bass-amp emulation is an obvious way to change a bass sound, but there are a few different ways to go about it. One is to pull up a model of a famous bass amp — but I often use bass amp emulation to spectrally reshape a DI’d bass sound with a different flavour to what you get from EQ, compression or even multi-band. I might tweak the model until it de-emphasises problem areas in the spectrum, or so that it adds some bite and punch. Or both.
Ampire, PreSonus’s bundled amp modeller, has exactly one bass amp model, but its two channels sound quite different, so try both and see which basic character is most suitable. Where a DI’d bass signal is low-end heavy and lacking presence, I sometimes choose a guitar cabinet model rather than a bass cab, to get the low-frequency roll-off and added bite. (I haven’t gotten results as good using a guitar amp model with a bass cab.)
Ampire also has a ‘pedalboard’ of stompbox-style effects. I find these largely a bit heavy-handed for bass work with the exception of the Equalizer pedal, which gives some nice shaping and colouring options.
Reflect On That
A bass sound can be made richer and wider by adding some synthesized acoustic reflections to it. I’m not talking about reverb tails here (though they can sound good on occasion, too), but short delays. This can be very effective, particularly on acoustic double bass, but comes with caveats. Remember what I said about losing definition? Too much reverb, or even just the wrong kind, can make the bass mushy and indistinct. Comb-filtering can change the timbre and make it a less mono-compatible sound. So there is reason to be careful, but ambience can be useful.
Any of the bundled reverbs in Studio One can accomplish this; even Presence’s onboard reverb can pull it off. 
Screen 4: The reverb section of the Presence FX is quite basic, but nevertheless capable of a suitable small-room ambience for bass. Note the Size control set a click or two above the bottom.Screen 4 shows the very small size, very low mix setting and very short pre-delay that work for me. If you were to use the Room Reverb plug-in instead, for example, you would probably want the Reverb mix set entirely to Early Reflections.
Distort & Delay
For this month’s final trick, I shall combine two techniques in one. The first technique is distortion. Again, it is easy to go too far too fast, so unless you’re looking for an old Jack Casady fuzz bass sound, use just enough distortion to rough things up a bit. In my example, I used the Distortion effect built into Presence, set to Soft Tube and with the amount turned extremely low. The other alternative is the RedLightDist plug-in. RedLightDist excels at intense distortion and is entirely capable of more subtle effects, but subtlety, of course, takes more tweaking than heavy-handedness.
The dual-delay idea used in the micro-shift example is the other technique in this double whammy. However, in this case, since no off-line pitch-shifting is involved, I can feed the delays from sends, instead of copying tracks and events. Adjust the levels and pan width of the delays until everything is delicious.
There are two variations I’ve tried and liked, too. In the first, the original channel (with no distortion) is sent pre-fader to three bus channels, two of them with delays inserted and the third with RedLightDist inserted. Pull the fader for the original down, adjust RedLightDist to taste, and mix the three channels, with the distortion channel panned dead centre. This gives you the width of the delay method with the punch of the distortion method confined to the centre. The second variation is to insert gentle low-pass filters on the delay channels. This results in a feeling of heft but holds a solid centre image. While most of these methods involve spreading the sound into stereo, it need not be wide stereo, and, in fact, is generally better when the width is narrower.
Next month, we’ll have five more ways to put inches, or even feet, on your bass line.
