Get those three things right and all that’s left to do is trigger the drop.

You need to focus on three parameters: the starting frequency, the stopping frequency, and the duration or length. The key to any DIY bass drop is automation. Most synths have way more options than you’ll ever need for such a basic sound, but for engineers looking to push their bass drops harder, noise and various waveform options can lead to some very unique combinations, as does post-processing with compression, overdrive, and other forms of manipulation. In the example below, we’re using Sub Destroyer: The tools required to create a bass drop are extremely minimal: your DAW and a synthesizer with a single oscillator. But when it comes down to the final product, there’s nothing more rewarding that a bass drop of your own design. You don’t have to give up the samples completely and in pre-production situations where you just need a placeholder sound, I’d actually encourage them. Bass drops can easily fit both the key and tempo without any type of transposition and that not only saves you time but can be a huge payoff in quality as well. You can massage the dynamics and frequencies to your mix’s specifications. When you’re creating your own bass drop, you control everything about it. The reason for this is actually pretty simple: control. But when it comes to the bass drop itself, DIY is the way to go. Now I love samples as much as the next person – layering in some explosive sounds with glass breaking or heavily bit-crushed audio can be a great way to add some character to these transitions. But despite knowing they need to use them, many of these producers spend tons of time and money on bass drop sample packs when they could easily be creating custom drops themselves with tools they already have at their disposal. In genres like EDM, they’re almost a requirement for a hit single. Music producers know the impact that a good bass drop adds. We’re going to take a look at why that is and how do-it-yourself bass drops are the perfect solution to their problems. Add a bass drop at the peak and let your heaviness of your song come crashing back with it.Īs widely as bass drops get used, many producers and engineers still struggle with getting them to fit just right in their songs. The same can go for just about any genre where the dynamics and music build to a crescendo. Electronic music uses bass drops in an extremely similar manner – adding size and scale to transitions between sections. In metal, bass drops are often used to kick off breakdown sections, making the listener feel like a bomb was dropped in their headphones. Such differences in the high frequency spectrum are hard to differ, but they create beating frequencies that will not only enrich the sonic textures but also will be reinforced by the subwoofer speaker making evident the frequencies that are implicit in the lower spectrum of the harmonic series, hence the name, Drop the Bass.So you want to make your own earth-shaking, ground-breaking bass drops, huh? A well-timed bass drop in the context of a mix can be the perfect way to transition between two sections of a song or add massive impact to the heaviest-hitting parts. Each of the eight different channels hanging in the celling carries a high frequency tone, which differs slightly from one to another (In the range of 30 to 120 Hz.) During the whole sound installation, a constant high pitch will be heard and the steps of the audience will activate adjacent frequencies with minimal differences.

A subwoofer is located in the middle of the space. Eight small speaker-cones hang from the ceiling, each one corresponding to one of the microphones. It consists of a space with a wooden floor in which eight contact microphones are distributed in order to sense the footsteps of the audience. The more people are taking part in the experience, the more complex such experience becomes. The installation invites to be explored and perceived within the space it covers, for the participant soon will discover that his/her actions will reveal a musical composition that has repercussions in both ends of the spectrums, thus creating a musical performance. It explores the dynamics of sound perception by juxtaposing frequencies in the extremes of the auditory spectrum through its activation by the audience’s presence and action, more precisely walking within the predetermined constructed space.ĭrop the Bass plays explicitly with the necessity of a perceptual agent (the audience) in order to elicit its effects. Drop the bass Multichannel interactive sound installation 2018ĭrop the Bass is a sound installation that explores the composition of new sounds through the modification of preexisting ones.

Bass space drop