How to Make a Rolling Bass for Melodic Techno

Open up Serum and go into 125 BPM. First determine the key. I don't think D works too good, because it's very low. I like to work in the F to B range, because then you get a really clean rolling bass.

Zoom in, create a little bit of space between each note and loop it. The first thing I do in the plugin is put it on mono legato and open up the portamento time. Then I take the octave down to minus one.

Take envelope 2 and drag and drop it onto the filter. Put the cutoff around 70 hertz, because you want to start low. Don't open it up too much, because then you get a clicky bass. The lower the cutoff, the tighter and more mellow it gets. It's a fine balance. I think around 400 milliseconds on that envelope is good.

The filter has different modes. The simplest one, MG Low 6, reduces the steepness, so you get a looser melodic techno bass. With 18 and 24 you go into psytrance territory. I really like it on 12, it's just perfect.

What I've seen in other videos is people saying you don't want a stereo bass. That's not true. The bass can be stereo, with unison, the hyper dimension and a chorus going around your head. The only thing you don't want is a stereo sub.

Out of Serum I add it to the mixer. With Pro-Q, create a brick wall, right click, stereo placement side, and now the sub is mono. If you don't have FabFilter, open up Maximus, turn the compressor off on every band and separate the sub at around 100 hertz.

Turn down oscillator B and FM modulate based on B. This helps if you want to keep your sub levels but also introduce a little bit of harmonics on the top end. Really find a sweet spot.

In the noise I add something like the attack of a glass lid, or a guitar mute, because it adds a little bit of click to the sound. Just don't steer away too much from the saw wave. It's very easy to go into a very complex sound, and that removes the melodic simple techno vibe.