So, looking for the perfect guide to teach you how to make Bass House? You’ve come to the right place!
Bass House is the crazy fusion of classic House beats with intricate bass sound design reminiscent of Dubtsep.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about making your first banging Bass House track. Let’s get started!
Want to check out this tutorial in video format? Head over to our YouTube channel 👇
A Quick Intro on How to Make Bass House
Bass House is a vibrant offshoot of house music that combines the genre’s signature groove with powerful, driving basslines.
Think of it as House meets Dubstep: a 4/4 beat with crazy bass sound design. That’s Bass House.
Bass House also features catchy melodies and playful vocal chops that keep things engaging. Typically, the tempo sits around 125-130 BPM, giving it a danceable vibe. Production-wise, it often boasts a sleek, modern finish.
Some of Bass House’s most popular artists currently include JOYRYDE, Habstrakt, and Jauz.
Step #1: How to Structure a Bass House Track
First things first, we are going to set our BPM at 128. This is a pretty standard tempo for Bass House, some tracks even go up to 130.
Bass House originally comes from Electro House, which tends to also be written at 128 BPM.
Once that is set up, I recommend bringing in a reference track in a similar style to Bass House that you want to be making.
For this tutorial, we will be using a track called “NRG” featuring Kota by Julian Jordan and Eleganto:
The reason I like to bring in a reference track is because:
- it will give us a guideline for the structure of our track;
- you can use later to reference your mixdown;
- it just gives you an idea of the vibe that you’re going 😊.
For now, I’m just going to use it for the structure. I’ve created a new MIDI track called “Structure”, and as you can see, everything in Bass House happens in 8-bar increments:
So let’s highlight some sections of 8 bars, create blank dummy MIDI clips, and name them based on what’s going on at each point. For example, we start with “Intro Drums”. Next up we can label the MIDI clip which we’ll call “Intro Drums developed” because some more hats come in.
You get the idea 😉
This is the final structure I’ve laid down based on our reference track:
- Intro drums (8 bars)
- Intro drums developed (8 bars)
- Breakdown hook (8 bars)
- Build (8 bars)
- Drop 1A (8 bars)
- Drop 1B (vocal chops and percs) (8 bars)
- Drop 1C (chill) (8 bars)
- Interlude (echo) (2 bars)
- Breakdown (8 bars)
- Build (8 bars)
- Drop 2A (8 bars)
- Drop 2B (8 bars)
- Drop 2C (8 bars)
- Outro Drums (16 bars)
Of course, your structure might look different based on the reference track you chose. In any case, we are always free to deviate from this structure at any point. It will simply serve as a guideline to map out our initial ideas.
Step #2: Hard-Hitting Bass House Drums
Let’s start straight into the drop. I often find this is one of the easiest way to compose, as the drop usually features most of the elements. I can then slowly strip back or add variations to create my other sections like the intro and breakdown.
I’m going to create a new audio track called Kick. We’re going to go to Drop 1A and we’re going to create our eight-bar loop here:
Pro-tip: press CTRL (or CMD on Mac) + L to directly loop a section of your track. Then press Z to zoom in.
I’m going to cycle through a few kick samples I’ve selected beforehand. I may end up combining a couple just for the sake of making something a bit unique.
In Bass House, we’re looking for something that’s punchy, but less so than a Tech House kick. It should be a kick that can move out of the way of the bass (i.e. not too much low end).
And honestly, just going through kicks from some good Bass House sample packs is going to be the best way to do that.
Here’s the first kick I’m picking:
I like to work in audio with my samples, but you’re welcome to drag them into a sampler and use MIDI instead. That’s absolutely a valid way to work too. I just prefer using audio, especially my main drum hits:
Layering our kick
Let’s try layering in a second kick. I found this kick, which we can use the tail of to add some extra weight:
When layering kicks, you need to pay extra attention to the waveforms. If they don’t align, you risk losing a lot of punch through phase cancellation:
All you need to do if this is the case is slightly nudge your layer so the waveforms align properly.
This is what our two kicks together sound like:
Next up, I’m going to use a free plugin I’ve been loving lately called KClip Zero. You can use any clipper you want but I’ve been really liking this one on my drum hits. This allows us to clip the samples so there are no peaks or anything weird going on.
Once that’s done, I’m going to resample our kick so we have our very own sample:
To do this:
- create a new audio track;
- set it to “Resampling”;
- arm the recording;
- select 1 beat;
- press record.
And boom! Now we have our very own kick sample to work with. We can now delete the 2 previous layers we were using.
Another trick professional Bass House producers use is to slightly fade in the kick. This is especially useful if your kick drum is a bit too clicky:
We’ll introduce some variation to our kick pattern later on.
Claps and Hats
Same as before, let’s cycle through some Bass House sample packs until we find something we like.
For our clap, I’ve ended up using 3 different layers. You might not need that many, but I find that often at least 2 layers give a richer sound than a single clap.
Pro-tip: add some latency to one of your layers. This will give an organic feel to your claps.
This is what it sounds like:
Let’s create one more track, but a MIDI one this time. This will be for our hi-hat.
The reason for this is to be able to modulate the decay in Simpler (it will make sense later 😉).
So what I’ve done is take an open hi-hat sample, but brought the sustain down to zero:
Simply place your hi-hat in between each kick and clap, and you’re good to go!
That’s our basic drum pattern down – now let’s move on to some sound design 😈
Step #3: Basses and Sound Design
Let’s get into the meat of the track. After all, it is called BASS House for a reason.
We’re going to try and design something from scratch. Now I just want to issue a word of caution.
It’s absolutely fine to use a preset. You don’t have to do the full sound design process yourself. For the sake of this tutorial, I’m going to try and design something – but sometimes it just doesn’t come together.
So let’s see what happens! I’m going to load up Serum. I am going to write the pattern with just a basic sine wave first:
Right now it sounds really basic:
Sounds a bit boring right now, so let’s move some notes around:
Pro-tip: for this track, I’m using the E Phrygian scale, which has a nice dark tone.
Nice! Now let’s head back into Serum and work on some sound design.
The first thing I’m going to do is work on the ADSR envelope. Let’s decrease the sustain, and increase the release. This will give a “plucky” sound to our bass.
We’re also going to use a filter with a bit of a movement. I tend to use LFOs on envelope mode to create these movements, just because I find it easier than using the Envelope section. So let’s drag our first LFO onto the cutoff:
Make sure LFO 1 is set to Envelope mode, then play with the following settings until you find something you like:
- envelope shape of the LFO;
- cutoff point;
- filter drive;
- filter resonance.
Here’s what we got now:
However, in Bass House, where the sound really comes from is actually Frequency Modulation (or FM).
Let’s see how that works. In oscillator B, we have basic shapes. What we can do is turn the level all the way down so it’s not coming through the output. Next, in oscillator A, go to the “FM from B” and increase the amount. Now you’re modulating OSC A with OSC B!
You can also add a bit of movement by routing LFO 2 to the FM amount. Don’t overdo though, because it will distort pretty quickly. Additionally, you can also move the sine wave up an octave or two, and see how that affects the sound.
I ended up shifting it up 2 octaves and 7 semitones:
You might also want to turn the “Rand” knobs to zero to minimize randomization. This will ensure a more consistent sound, which is important for basses.
After some post-processing with OTT, EQ, distortion, sidechain compression, and stereo width, here’s our final result:
There are a few steps I skipped here for the sake of the length of this tutorial. If you’re curious, make sure to check out the full video tutorial on our YouTube channel.
This is section 1A of our drop taken care of (in terms of bass at least).
For Drop 1B, I’m actually going to modulate the octave of sine controlling the FM. So in Drop 1A, it’s set at 2 octaves, but in Drop 1B we’ll jump to 3 octaves. This is what it’s going to sound like:
It just really helps bring up the energy!
Let’s fill out our arrangement now with some more bass sounds.
For this, I’m not going to design a sound from scratch, but rather use some Bass House presets I found on Splice. The idea here is to fill some of the gaps in our current bass pattern:
In that audio example, I’ve actually removed the first note from our bass and replaced it with a laser-type sound.
Of course, you don’t need to follow each of these steps to the letter. This is just to give you some ideas and inspiration.
I’m also going to add another bass sound later on in the pattern. Right now the bass pattern becomes repetitive quite quickly. So this should help keep things interesting:
This is what it will sound like:
You can keep going like this as long as you want, adding new bass sounds to keep your track interesting.
Here’s the final bass arrangement I ended up with after a few hours of sound design and tweaking:
I think that enough bass sound design for one Bass House track 😅. Let’s now move on to some other melodic elements.
Pro-tip to add movement
The term “movement” can mean a lot of different things in music.
But have you ever felt your music was just… static? Like there’s no real flow to the notes and melodies?
That is one of the issues many producers run into when writing in MIDI. Everything can quickly sound robotic. So here’s a tip you can use to make your sounds, patterns, and melodies come alive in a Bass House track.
Pitch Bend is a common MIDI control that you’ll find on most MIDI controllers:
A pitch bend allows you to literally bend the pitch of a note. It’s what you hear for example in the lead melody of Peggy Gou’s massive hit:
However, you don’t need a pitch bend or even a MIDI controller to get the same effect!
In Ableton Live, Switch to “Envelopes” in your clips, and select MIDI CTRL and Pitch Bend:
We can now draw a curve to bend the pitch of our note:
This is a super useful trick to use to add some attack at the start of a note. I’ve done it quite a few times in this track, especially on the first bass notes of some patterns. Listen to how to first note pitches up here:
Instant movement added! 🥳
And That’s a Wrap for this Guide on How to Make Bass House
That’s it for this guide on how to make Bass House! It was heavily focused on bass and sound design, so if you want to check out the full arrangement, make sure to check out the full tutorial on our YouTube channel.
And if you haven’t yet, grab the full project file for Ableton Live + the full sample pack and Serum presets for FREE right here!
