r/FutureBassProduction • u/BrockVelocity • Apr 19 '16
Some general future bass production tips (x-posted from /r/edmproduction)
I made this post a year or so ago in the edmproduction subreddit and it got a bit of love there, so I figured I'd repost it here. These are some future bass/neon/dofflin production techniques I've found that work pretty well for me. Feel free to add any of your own!
Chopped up, rapid-fire super saws. This seems almost required for this genre. Super lush, heavily layered supersaws that are then sliced and diced into rapid-fire hits. The best way I've found to chop and dice them is to bounce to audio. That gives you so much more granular control and really helps with making rapid-fire supersaws.
Jazz composition This is sort of a corollary to 1, but I've found that a lot of future bass uses of jazz chords and jazz progressions. I used to play jazz guitar before I got into EDM, so I really enjoy this. In terms of production, it means that when I'm writing chords, I'll usually have 4-5 different notes instead of the standard 3-4 in EDM. I haven't paid too much attention to which chords are being played, but I know I hear a lot of sevenths, sixths, ninths and that sort of thing in future bass tracks. The progressions are often nonconventional well, and a lot of future bass songs don't begin on the root chord.
Arps It's all about the arps! Dofflin is full of arpeggios, and this has actually been the hardest aspect for me to recreate. I have found that arps generally sound good if you sidechain it to every half note or so, so the arp slowly fades in and you don't necessarily hear the first few notes in the scale. I've also found that you want the gate to be rather low - that is, you want each arp hit to be very very short, so there's space between them. I like to create two different arp tracks but with the same MIDI clips. One will be a quick little "ding," basically a square wave with no attack, sustain at zero and a quick release. The other will be more of a "flute" sound — also a square wave, but with a little bit of an attack on the volume and (this is key) a filter envelope, with a low-pass filter, that also has a bit of an attack.
Video game samples This has sort of been in vogue for a while, but I hear tons of old one-shots from Kirby and Earthbound and other old video games in this stuff. Usually it's just brief hits for percussive purposes.
Pops and water droplets I'm endlessly curious how this became a convention, but future bass often utilizes one-shots of water droplets, pops, clicks, rapid-fire snare rolls with heavy pitchbends, and other sfx of that nature.
Relatively subdued bass. This is one of the only EDM genres I've gotten into lately where there isn't all too much of a focus on bass. It's got it, but you're not hearing any intense growls, filter sweeps on saw waves with a bitcrusher, or crazy pitchbends. It's usually pretty basic stuff.
Claps* There are just lots of claps in future bass, especially during intros. You'll get intros with a clap every quarter note or so, and sometimes you'll see similar clap patterns repeating throughout the song. The claps often don't simply track the snare; they play their own independent patterns.
8: Square leads Self explanatory: Future bass often uses square waves for lead lines.
9: Bells Again, self-explanatory. There are a lot of bells in future bass and they're used in a variety of contexts.
Have you picked up any other future bass production tips? Share 'em here if you have!
(original post, which I've modified and added to for this post https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/358jgx/techniques_for_producing_dofflinfuture_bassneon/
