Project 1 Update

We’ve taken on the project of making a drum and bass song of commercial quality. The song, titled ‘Never Let You Go’ has four main elements that needed to be sequenced, recorded and mixed, those being the drums and bass obviously, vocals and chord progression played with a synth. The bass was also to be made with an analog synth; We chose the Moog sub 37 for the bass and sub bass as we found it to be the best option for bass from receiving positive reviews and recommendations from review sites, fellow students and lecturers. Therefore we booked the Raven MIDI room; Not wanting to go in unprepared we all did independent research on the Sub 37 via various youtube tutorials that we shared amongst the each other. Below are a picture and the tutorials we utilized:

Going into that session with a basic understanding of how to create and manipulate the sub 37 sounds we aimed to make a sub bass patch, bass patch which would play the same notes under one another and a synth lead patch within the 4 hour session. The sub bass was made with a sub oscillator and an oscillator set to a sine wave to keep it simple; We chose this combination because it’s purpose was simply to add content to the sub bass frequencies and decided making a complex patch would take attention away from the vocal, and masking the bass line and kick drum.

Reference track for the sub bass:

With the bass line we wanted something quite gritty to contrast the clean grand piano playing throughout and we hope it will add a lot of that gritty, driving character that fits so well into the drum and bass genre; Again with the sub 37 we went into the session without a true reference track and very little synthesizer experience between us which made it a timely process of adjusting each setting until something sounded good playing the MIDI sequence. We did create a dirty bass line with two saw waves to give it the dirty buzz we wanted but due to an unstable oscillation which turned out to be the LFO we did end up going back to the studio to create a more suited main bass line. What we have may still be missing some desired quality and we will be looking at layering a digital synth.

Reference track for bass synth and synth chords, DJ Fresh again: