How to make Future Bass + General Music Production Tips Inside ;)

in #music7 years ago

How to make Future Bass

For a couple years now Future Bass has been a genre with tremendous growth, from the underground communities of beatmakers on the interwebs to mainstream songs under Justin Bieber's vocals.
It honestly is understandable for such a beautiful genre with so much variety and room for creativity (Which I consider the lack of this to be the reason Big Room fell from the spotlight a few years ago) to grow this much, I can see it last for many years and beyond,

Some of the tips I can give you in arrangement are:

Intro:

  • Low Pass every or some elements for 4 to 8 bars, slowly going up to their full frequency range to get a sweep up effect.
  • Introduce different elements every 4 bars and bigger variations every 8 bars.

Usually, songs in future bass have a kind of common structure:
Intro - Verse - Build Up - Drop - Verse - Build Up - Drop - Bridge - Build Up - Drop

Verse:

  • You can record the first note of your melody, vocals and/or any lead element with a ton of reverb and then reverse that recording in order to create a "sucked in" effect, to make everything gell toghether much better.
    *Sweep ups, downs and impacts are your friends to ease the transitions between sections.

Build up:

  • It's of utmost importance that your build up generates a lot of tension because the more power you get the easier it will be for the drop to hit hard and not sound weak or unexciting.

Drop:

  • I think the power and adrenaline lies on the sub.
  • Silences are your friend in order to generate more impact.
  • Add different percussive elements every now and then to add a lot of variation. (applies to verses as well)
  • Vocal Chops are more powerful and organic than standard leads but both work.
  • Play a lot with the possibilities, listen to other future bass tracks you like and separate every detail you like until you understand everything that is going on, try to recreate a few drops!

Bridge:

  • A musical limbo for your track, maybe it's just a few pads and the lead melody drowned in reverb, sounding in the distance, tease the main elements of the song on different ways than the ones you previously used, get as creative and inventive as you can here!

General Future Bass Composing tricks:

  • 7th Chords are your best friend.
  • Also 9th, 11th, etc.
  • Pretty much anything that applies to jazz can be used in future bass composition. Lol.
  • I like to think of future bass as dubstep on a suit! Haha.
  • F Bass (or at least mine) is pretty much a combination Trap drums + Melodic Dubstep elements like chords and stuff + progressive house melodies + 7th chords.
  • Water drops, bells, and elegant metalic/crystal hit sounds all add character and finesse to your track, which is usually needed, but not always.
  • Get your favorite tracks on your daw and visually separate every section via locators (if you're on Ableton Live) or midi clips with the length of every section if you're on another daw that doesn't have such thing as a locator. This way you'll exactly how many bars does your break need to be, build up, drop, etc.
  • Use the LFO inside your synth to make your chords wobble, another way you can achieve this is by playing with the ADSR (Attack, Delay, Sustain and Release) Envelopes of your patch/preset/instrument, until you get it short one-shot-sounding.

Mixing:

  • For my mixing I usually just level things and add tons of saturation to everything, high pass everything I don't need off a certain sound, low pass everything I don't need off a certain sound, EQ, EQ, EQ, Sidechain everything that is not percussive to the kick and snare, do not put many similar sounds on a layer because that will make your overall sound muddy and unpleasant, use different sound that work toghether!

I will post later a sound design small guide for beginners soon, stay tune! I'll make sure to tag you anyways. :)

DISCLAIMER: This is all based on my opinion and personal knowledge, I could be saying completely wrong things, but it's what I apply to my music. So take everything I say with a grain of salt! Haha.

Hope this can help you in some way! Peace! :)

Take a listen to my music!

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Hey itsooyah. This is a very helpfull post. I just started out making futurebass and struglled with the structure of the song. I will post new tracks shortly. You got yourself a new follower! Keep up the good work!