The difference may seem subtle at first, but try throwing it into a track with a few other elements. You can recreate this by running a sine wave riff through a bitcrusher and some analogue saturation plugins.
Sine wave bass is notoriously difficult to make interesting, but a combination of 12-bit circuitry and less-than-transparent analogue outputs added real oomph. Switching on either machine yielded a default sample of a simple sine wave bass, which became synonymous with early hip-hop, hardcore, jungle and DnB. To recreate this sound, simply add a low-pass filter before your bitcrusher in the effects chain.Īkai's early S900 and S950 samplers were famously prodigious synth bass monsters. I was like, 'Oh, shit, this is the craziest thing on the planet!'" Now I just got the bass part of the sample. I found out that if you put the phono or quarter-inch jack halfway in, it filters the high frequency. I couldn't hear any of the high-end part of it. "One day I was playing Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, and it came out real muffled. For example, early-'90s New York hip-hop was loaded with grimy, filtered basslines, thanks in part to a quirk of the E-MU SP-1200, as Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee told The Village Voice. Vintage samplers were nothing if not quirky, so it's worth brushing up on the idiosyncrasies of the gear behind your favourite classic tracks. If a reversed sound doesn't end on a beat, try adding another percussive element at that point to better maintain the groove. It's usually best to place them so that the end of the reversed sound lines up with a division of the beat, even if there's no other hit occurring at the same time. Reversed percussion hits like hi-hats and claps can feed into the unreversed hit for more emphasis, or even just sit within the rhythm and give the groove some more body. Reserved sounds can be great for edits, and can even form an integral part of your rhythms. For nearly as long as people have been sampling sounds, they've been reversing them.