Okay, I’m going to throw a few things out there that I haven’t seen specifically mentioned (or maybe I’ve just overlooked) – not necessarily for baglickz, because he obviously doesn’t want to hear about how good bass can be done digitally, he only wants to know why it can’t be done – since it *can* be done digitally and in fact is much easier to get tight, manageable bass digitally than in analog (if you know your tools), there’s no way to answer that question. For the rest of us who actually want to learn something instead of validate our own ignorance, I’ll throw out what I know (or at least what I think I know:P).

The first thing needed for good bass is an appropriate attack transient – dynamics processors can help shape this, but it’s easy to overdo it and frankly any synth with flexible envelope curve adjustment can do whatever needs to be done. For sub-bass, it’s probably best to either sample the bassline or use a synth which has oscillators which can reset their phase upon each note trigger. I find that for sub-bass it’s often smart to use an envelope with an extremely rapid decay (just a few ms) to modulate the pitch, this will help define the attack.

Second, it’s important *not* to have too much going on in the low-end. Your actual bass tone should probably not contain any detuning, chorus, etc. as this leads to phase cancellation and a weaker bass. If you want a more complex bass sound, it’s best to layer something simple (like a sine or triangle wave) with the more complex bass sound, and apply a highpass filter to the complex bass sound – this will give you a pure low end, with more movement in the upper frequency spectrum.

Which leads to point number three – one reason analog bass sounds good is that it is never pure – even self-oscillation from a minimoog’s ladder VCF (which should theoretically be purely sinusoidal) contains harmonics. The mind is very good at recognizing patterns, and when the ears receive a sound with harmonics corresponding to a low frequency, the mind can reconstruct the fundamental even if it is very weak or absent completely. This is essentially how bass enhancers work. There are many means to the same end, and the best path is often specific to the mix in question. The thing to always look out for is where you have room in your mix. See where you have available space, and decide how you can use that space to accentuate your bassline. Let’s say you don’t have a lot of energy going on in the 800-1200Hz range, you want a nice basline but you’ve already got a pad and a bassdrum filling up a lot of the low-end. One approach would be to use something like a sawtooth waveform, and apply two parallel bandpass filters, each with 100% keytracking – tune the first filter to the fundamental with low to moderate gain and/or resonance, and the second filter to the 4th harmonic or so with higher resonance and perhaps a little more gain. This way, you’ve got the fundamental which is present but not overwhelming, and a lot of frequency information correlated to the fundamental in an area of the mix which can support it. That’s actually a pretty simplistic example, but I think it illustrates well how to think about a bassline in terms of the entire mix.

Another technique is to use multiband compression on a bassline – a low amount of compression in the low-end, and more compression and transient shaping in perhaps the 1-2k range to give the bassline better articulation and a punchy, compressed sound without actually messing with the low-end too much.

The best way to really understand how to craft a good bass sound is to brush up on acoustics-related physics (and psychoacoustics, etc.) since bass is something that is so sensitive to what it interacts with. There’s no magic elixer, it just comes down to knowing what the sound is doing, what you want it to do, and how to get it to do what you want it to do – and sometimes, recognizing when that isn’t possible, and making a reasonable compromise.

But one thing is for certain – digital has done fantastic things for bass. If there is a reason that something like a Minimoog makes great bass, it’s that it does a lot of things ‘automagically’ that happen to make nice bass. The advantage of the digital realm is that you have complete control over every aspect of the sound – the disadvantage is that you have to know a little bit more about what’s going on – the computer only does what you tell it to, so you’ve got to know how to tell the computer what to do.

Ah, yes! Thank you for mentioning something very important which I omitted – cut the low frequencies! It is usually a good idea to apply low shelving EQ to every track in your mix, set to like 200Hz and with a lot of cut, like -12dB at least. Even the bassline should have a low shelving EQ, the only difference is that the frequency should be lower, like 40-60Hz. That super-low energy is usually not audible, but it will rob you of the energy our bass needs!

I was generalizing a little – for most genres, 40Hz is extremely low for any kind of bass. Of course, in a genre like jungle (circa 94-96) where there isn’t much going on outside of the break and the bassline, you can just use brute force and use up most of your headroom on a gigantic bassline with a fundamental of 28Hz or something rediculous. The whole point is that *usually* there will be undesireable subharmonic frequencies in your tracks that you will want to eliminate, since really low frequencies require a lot of energy to reproduce and will kill your available headroom. But it’s music, there are no hard and fast rules. There is of course no point in filtering out the fundamental in a really low bassline and then trying to fake the result with studio trickery if that huge, low bassline is what you wanted to begin with.

It’s not as bad as people make digital bass sound. EQ is a big part of it. People have commented in the overall volume you can have frequency wise before everything adds up bleeds and makes a mess.

If you are dealing with alot of higher frequencys, or maybe just drum and bass, then you don’t have to be AS carefull, you can let more frequency in.

But in a mix for a song, you do have to shelve, or EQ the bass to fit into the mix you are doing, the same goes for analog. The volume adds up.

As people have posted sometimes you have to do something counterintuitive, you have to cut the extrem lows and highs for it to stick out in a mix, and still not max out the monitor volume and blead all over the place.

That’s generally what I do too.

However sometimes my goal if I can make it work is to create a sub bass so low you can’t really here it too much but you can FEEL it hit you in a concert or with really good speakers. As long as it doesn’t cause clipping I really like to add a very low sub bass that you can’t really here, but yeat it makes your body vibrate.

It’s just one option, and that one you can do with both analong and digital.

One other thing, analog filters at high resonances are just not duplicated by analog emulations they just aren’t as good, they could get there, for our ear limitations, but they just aren’t there yet.

I’m guessing you get a smooth curve to cut off the frequency, a constant cure that limits the osc freq, at a logarithmic cut off with no gaps letting parts of the osc sign get through.

Digital is just not smooth. But it’s very nater it’s going to let some frequency get through because it can only form an integral under an analog curve, and thus it lets some sound get through, and it can’t actually cut some of the highest sine wave freq’s out, and that’s why some emulations leave it at a simple sine wave output at very high resoncances and that does sound crappy. With enough EQ tweaking and enough bands you can really get digital bass to sound good though.

It just takes work, and tedious EQ’ing and maximizing. But you can get it to sound pretty good.

he uses a plugin called BassChorus VST (unfortunately for me and many others, only available for PC *sob*

so.. that’s for the widening. The sounds themself are often very simple, saws and squares, but the trick as others have said is in the musicianship. You have to use multiple patches but they have to flow effortlessly together, with clever syncopation and lots of really well crafted silence as well. Another trick I have come up with is automating pitch drops in time. If you automate a ramp-down LFO to coarse pitch it will drop the bass and you can syncopate it. Check out this track i made and skip to about two minutes in when the vocals cut out to clearly hear what I’m talking about. The bass drop is key in this track to making it really groove.