Clean Psytrance Bassline by E-Clip

Welcome everybody to the first Blog on eclip-production.com

Let’s start this series of blogs with the most important and the most wanted lesson – Psytrance Bassline.

Plugins needed:

1. Serum

2. Envelopeshaper or Waves Trans-x

3. FabFilter Fab-Q3

4. Voxengo PHA-979

5. Xfer LFO Tool

Open the Serum for setting up the synthesis of the Bassline.

1. First, go to Serums Global window, and check the option “Double-Click for the typable values on controls.”

1. Envelope 1 – Attack to 0, Decay 1/16th note, Sustain -3db, Release 15ms

1. Turn on the Filter- Choose 18db or 24db – Cutoff to 0, Resonance to 0

1. Connect Envelope 2 to Cuttof by clicking on the Envelop2 and drag&drop to the filter’s cutoff

1. Envelope 2 – Attack to 0, decay to 1/16 note (double click on the decay and type 1/16 and press enter), Sustain 60%, Release 10ms

1. Now move to the Oscillator A, phase put on the left, random to 0 and click on the pen icon to draw a new waveform. When the Waveform window is opened, in the downright corner double click on the number 8 and type 6 instead. Now use the 3rd form the top lines and draw a straight line from the left up corner till the end.

4hr in the studio with E-Clip

1. Oscillator A Volume put to zero, and connect Velocity to OSC A Volume.

Now your synthesis of the bassline is ready. Draw a midi with 3 notes, and put velocity of the first note to 60. Now we will continue to the coloring of the bass line.

Before we move to the next part, I would like to add that in this blog I won’t use any distortion on the bassline. In past, I have been using a lot of distortions on the bassline, but after I updated my studio speakers to Focal SM9, I have realized that distortion plugins mess up phase of the bassline, and therefore now I’m trying to make clean basslines without any deformations, and therefore I have stopped distorting my basslines.

Now for processing bassline, first I will add EnvelopeShaperMultiband (Cubase plugin), for those who are not using Cubase, alternative is Waves Trans-X Multiband. Both plugins are doing the same thing, and that’s control of the transients in 4 bands. To avoid phase changes, 1st band should be at 500hz, that’s the frequency where I found that phase of the low-end stays the same. 3rd band set from 2-2.5KHz to 8Khz, and in that range add from 2 to 5db, its a matter of taste and choice.

The next thing to do is to add FabFilter Pro-Q3 and set it up to the “Linear-Phase” mode.

Now make a lowcut with 30db per octave, and set it up on the frequency of the first harmonic of your bassline.

Reduce around 300hz for 2-2.5db