Logic Pro X Quick Tips: Make A Dirty Bass Like Galantis

Learn how to create a dirty sounding bass to give your music edge and power. Mastering In Logic guides you through the essential steps to achieve a dirty bass using Logic’s Alchemy and Retro synths.

Logic Pro X Quick Tips Make A Dirty Bass Like Galantis

As always here’s the transcript from the video!

In this quick tips I’m going to show you how to make a dirty bass in the style of Galantis, a bass sound that’s found in many styles of electronic dance music.

Dirty bass is often referred to as the type of bass that either has a lot of distortion or many discordant overtones.

We’re not going to create anything too discordant here but we’re certainly going to add plently of overdrive and harmonics.

What I’m going to create is commonly found and would fit into to many styles grime, dubstep, drum and bass and other forms of electronic dance music.  Ultimately it’s up to you to take these ideas and then tweak them to you liking and your style!

Before we get started let’s listen to the bass I’ve created emulating Galantis’ bass line (Check the video for the sound).

So I’d say there’s three key areas you need to cover when creating a big dirty bass sound. Subs, high frequency harmonics and stereo width.  Stereo width isn’t essential but it can contribute to the perceived size of your bass sound.

Creating A Sub Bass With The Retro Plugin

So Let’s start of with the sub.

A sub can be anything from a simple sine wave playing in the correct octave to provide weight to the sound and it’s usually relatively clean.

Triangles and Saw toothes work well too but carry higher frequency harmonics so might need a low pass filter to clean them up and get them all nice and subby.

For my bass sub though I used the Retro Synth in FM mode.

You can get some great subby sounds with this plugin.  I set the FM Slider to 0 and the Carrier slider to 0.5 ensuring the sound was subby but had a slight modulated character but nothing too crazy.

To add some attitude I increased the harmonic, inharmonic and shape sliders to achieve a very subtle overdrive.  This gave the sound a bit of grit to help add edge to the bass line too; adding grit also brings the sound further forward.

Adding harmonics to the sound caused the high frequencies to be too dominant and as this is all about the sub Retro’s LP filter came in handy to remove some of the unwanted top end.

Finally some low cut from Logic’s EQ and some subtle compression keeps the bass pinned down keeping it nice and even.

To create something similar it should take you no time at all. Get a subby sound maybe add some higher frequency harmonics, tame the top end, calm the super lows and you’ll be there!

Adding The Dirty With Alchemy and Retro

So with the sub sorted it’s time to really add some dirty attitude to dirty the sound up and make it more aggressive .. so here’s what I did.

I loaded two new tracks one with the Retro synth and the other with Alchemy, you could use any instruments you want but these are the ones I chose.

To gain complete control over the width and sound I switched each channel to stereo pan and place them in mono, this meant I could eventually place the sounds where ever I wanted in the stereo field without worry about the parts being too wide.

Next I created a very simple distorted bass in Alchemy by clearing the patch from the file menu, selecting a Saw Tooth and a Pusle wave in slots A and B.

From the Oscillator controls I simply adjusts the phase, sync and number dials to make the part bigger.  These dials are great at adding bigness.

Once I had adjusted both parts it was time to dirty up the sound, so, I simply added some distortion from the effects tab to really drive the sound hard.

Once that was done it was simply a case of adding a low cut filter with the Channel EQ to remove the lows.

The whole idea about this bass is it’s to add high frequency harmonics agitated by distortion so you don’t want the part to have too much low end otherwise it will clutter the sub and you’ll end up with a horrible muddy mess.

Check out the sound in the video.

Once Alchemy was sorted it was on to bass number 3 and for this I used Retro in Analog mode.

I adjusted both Oscillators tweaked the other mod dials until I found something that worked.  My aim was to create something similar to the Alchemy bass I’ve just talked about, you’ll get to why I did that in a minute

I find Retro an easy synth to work with simply diving in and adjusting the dials can quickly provide lot’s of unique sounds.  Of course there’s theory behind how all this works but for this quick tips we don’t have time to do an overview. Let’s move on.

What really gave this sound it’s grit and attitude was the Bit Crusher I drove the signal hard so that it really distorted.

Increasing the Drive dial adds volume so I compensated by bringing the channel fader down.  You could use the Gain plugin to pull the level down but I’m lazy and just dropped the channel fader.

Finally I cut the lows to drop out the bass end boosted the high mids to make it feel more aggressive.  This really pulls the sound forward in the mix, our ears are most sensitive to high mid frequencies which is why sounds that are boosted in this area often feel like they are the parts that sit forward in a mix.

Using Logic Pro’s Stereo Pan to make it big and dirty

So to make this bass really big I needed to do one last thing.

Remember I switched the Pan dial to Stereo Pan and dragged them into mono and made both synths sound similar to each other?

Well this enabled me to pan the two high frequency basses left and right leaving the sub in the middle.

This does two things it spreads the bass sound at the same time is leaving the sub in the centre of the mix providing a strong mono signal as well as a wide stereo sound from the other bass parts that isn’t cluttered by all the sounds sitting on top of each other.

The result of all these moves is I end up with a powerful, gritty but clear bass part!  Also by separating them into three bass sounds it gives me the ability to use them in different ways throughout the song.

Check it out on the video to see how it all worked together!

So there you have it an easy way to make a big dirty bass.

If you want to create something similar just remember sub, which is often a cleaner bass sound, high frequency distortion and stereo width and you’ll be as dirty as me!

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