SUB BASS

If you don’t reach the bottom, how can you hit the top? Get the lowdown on making your subs sound sweet

Subbass is a music production term typically used to refer to frequencies in the range 20-80Hz – the lowest limit of human hearing. Although many acoustic and electric instruments generate frequencies in this region, sub-bass only really became a usable sonic tool in its own right in the 80s, when the booming kicks of the Roland TR-808 and single-cycle test tones of various Akai samplers became available to dance producers. This resulted in records like LFO’s LFO (bit.ly/1ooH3oo) and JJ Fad’s Supersonic (bit.ly/1sJhyOg).

Subsequently, early DnB tracks like Urban Shakedown’s Some Justice (bit.ly/2Vs7Giv) and Kromozone’s The Rush (bit.ly/2Vqin5e) began to put sub-bass gymnastics center stage, and by the time dubstep rolled around in the early noughties, huge subs were de rigueur. Nowadays, even pop music has to rock the bottom end, so understanding how to get the most out of the sub-80Hz range is an absolute essential for any producer of music.

In this guide to synthesizing sub-bass, we’ll show you how to create awesome bottom-end sounds from scratch and layer them up with complementary mids, and use filtering to generate subs from full-frequency-range sounds. When using this stuff in your music, bear in mind that such an extremely low end is hard to monitor correctly.

Most rooms have a fundamental frequency in the region of 20-200Hz, which has a negative effect on low-end reproduction and makes it hard to judge what your subs are doing. This being the case, we strongly recommend the use of headphones and spectral analysis tools in order to double-check your sound design and mixing choices.

1.Synthesising a basic sub