Creating a wobble bass - Logic Pro Tutorial

- [Voiceover] Now, let's talk about bass. In so many genres in electronic music, particularly in dance music, feeling the bass and a great bassline is so important to how people respond to the music and how people really take in a track, especially on the dance floor. That's why big club sound systems put so much time into tuning a room to make sure that the bass sits perfectly in a room, or nightclub, or venue. So, we're in exercise file 03_01, and what I'm gonna do is play this exercise file so you can hear it. We're in a little bit more of a dubstep or future bass kind of track with a wobble bass, and I'm going to show you how to create that. First, let's listen to the track (electronic music) So, you can hear, there's a little riser there at the end, and I have cycle mode on, so this is set to loop. Remember we can turn cycle mode on and off by hitting 'c' on our keyboard. But, essentially, what you're hearing, is a few different instances of our moving wobble bass and it's moving because of the rate of our LFO. So, you can also hear that there's kind of a call and response created with the different basslines, and maybe I'll just solo the basslines now, so you can hear them all without anything else. (musical tones) Adjusting the rate of an LFO can be done in most synthesizers and plug-ins within Logic. But for creating our wobble bass today, we're going to use Logic's ES2 plug-in. So, I'm gonna open up our inspector, and by the way, you can see all of the tracks, I've made the basslines in this template blue, the drums are green, this siren riser going up is red. You can easily change the colors of tracks, which is a simple way to rename them or have a kind of synesthesia way of cataloging your sounds when you're just deep in making music. You can change the colors by bringing up the color palette and you can do that by hitting option+c on your keyboard, and then just selecting a particular region and a particular color. You wanna select the color first, and then click on the region. So, I'm gonna close out of that for now. We're gonna go to this last track here, where we have a retro synth, but no MIDI data in the track. I'll show you retro a little bit later. We're gonna load up the ES2 synthesizer plug-in. We're gonna load that as a stereo plug-in, and in its default setting, (musical tones) it's a polyphonic synth that is very versatile and you can use it to design actually a lot of sounds. What I'm going to do first is put the synth in mono, (musical tones) which essentially means that it's going to play one note at a time, rather than poly, where I can hold down and play chords, (musical tones) or many different notes. Or rather the specific number of voices that I have selected. But I'm gonna go back to mono so that it's only playing one note at a time, because generally for bass, you're not gonna be overlapping notes. Into our drop down menu, you can see we have a bunch of different presets for this synthesizer plug-in, but I'm gonna go down to Tutorial Settings, and I'm going to pick FM Megafat, for now. I encourage you to experiment with all of these different settings. These are essentially starting point waveforms that you can use to sculpt your sounds. In the default state for FM Megafat, (musical tones) we have kind of a moving FM sound. On the other basslines that I've already created in this example, you can see we've used the analogue saw initialize setting. It's a little bit more of a simple patch, but I think for this one, let's go with FM Megafat. And, one of the things that we wanna do right now we have our oscillator tuned up. (musical tones) We have three oscillators in this synthesizer, I'm just gonna turn on the first one for now. (musical tones) So you can see we're in a sine wave, (musical tones) I'm gonna bring that to square wave, and just change the shape of the oscillator, which means it's going to be playing every other harmonic overtone, and then I'm also going to bring the pitch of the oscillator down to -24. (musical tones) Cool. Now, I'm going to turn on our second oscillator. (musical tones) I'll bring that to zero. But, I'm gonna adjust the mix here. This triangle in the middle is the mix of the three oscillators, and as I move that slider over, you can see the percentages changing. (musical tones) And I can bring up the pitch of the second oscillator. (musical tones) I like that, but I think for a bassline, it's a little bit too high, so I'm gonna bring it back to 0. (musical tones) So, now we have both of our oscillators going and for the second oscillator, you can see it's a saw wave, and again, our first oscillator is a square wave. (musical tones) So now what we wanna do to get the wobble going, is we want to assign certain parameters in our routing section. So, we're going to first go to our target and we're going to adjust the target to Cutoff 1 & 2, which is the cutoff of the filter. (musical tones) And then, we're going to make the source LFO 2. And one of the reasons that we're using LFO 2 is because LFO 2 is actually tempo syncable, so, (musical tones) now, you can hear, we have the wobble. But right now, as we move this over, we're looking at the wobble in Hertz. (musical tones) But, what I'm gonna do if we bring the slider down, we start seeing it in note values. (musical tones) So, that's the wobble bass in sixteenth notes. And, I'm actually gonna mute some of the other ones that are already in the session and let's hear how our new wobble bass sounds. (electronic music) So you can see we have our basic wobble bass and you can duplicate this track by hitting command+d and that will make a second instance of this wobble bass, and in genres like dubstep or trap or future bass, a lot of the times the bassline is kind of a call and response with subtle variations. So, a cool technique is duplicating the bassline you've created a few times and then going into the individual settings to change things like the source waveform, or adjusting the cutoff and making subtle variations to create really cool wobble basslines. I encourage you to experiment and play around a lot. And also try making the wobble bass using different synths in Logic. Remember the parameters are going to be the same. You're going to want to essentially assign the cutoff to a tempo syncable LFO, and then adjust the rate based on the note value of your project. And then from there, all the other parameters can be experimented with to create something really unique. So now let's record something with the new bassline we created. Let's hit record. (electronic music)