anyone have any good tips for getting some old school ebm bass tones out of the A4
What means EBM ?
1 Like
Electronic Body Music - Bands like Frontline Assembly, Neon Judgement, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, Borghesia, Skinny Puppy, etc…
Especially Nitzer Ebb was a more than major influence on the Detroit Techno scene
1 Like
OK ! I’ll have to listen again …
Oh! and Kraftwerk 
I’ve known about Electronic Body Music for some time. But at first glance, I translated EBM to mean Electronic Bowel Movement. No disrespect to the artist above, but changing the acronym is suggested…
that’s it
im trying to get a starting point on bass tones in the vein of nitzer ebb or the like
i’m a serious novice when it comes to synth sound design
i’ve only really started becoming serious about in the past year or so
sorry i know it’s a noob ass question
but i figured some of you guys might have some good pointers
the a4/keys seems like a really good machine for makeing electro/ebm/industrial stuff
which is why i got it
but i’ve just been stuck in a black hole trying to make good bass sounds
Can you point to a particular track?
“EBM bassline” is a bit vague.
I think Front 242 at least, and probably many others relied on layering analog mono synths with digital FM synths so may be hard to achieve with A4 alone.
There is a great thread on A4 bass you should read through: A4 deep bass tips?
Something I hear when I listen to modern EBM, like Covenant, I love this song of theirs “Judge of my Domain”, or Funker Vogt, especially a God Module remix of Youth Code’s Sick Skinned, the bass is huge and mix dominating.
It sounds like a lot of the time there is some unison in the bass. Your in luck that the A4 happens to have Unison, so after you read through that thread and get a good basic baseline going, head into the poly settings, turn on Unison and increase the number of voices, detune and maybe even spread.
Also, the bass in EBM sounds super compressed. So your going to need to run it into a compressor, hardware or software that the A4 alone doesn’t have and squash that signal for extra loudness.
You should be close at that point.
I also tried to do EBM basslines some months ago and quite liked the results I got with the A4 using Live as external sequencer. I’ve uploaded an A4 sound patch to the files section. try it, mabye it’s in the direction of the sound you’re looking for. Make sure you enable A4’s Arp (mod tru,spd 2, rng 2) and use slighty shifted note as well as adjusted note length in external sequencer to get some sort of swing (like in the attached image).
A lot of the cool EBM bass tones are very simple. A snappy filter envelope is pretty much the clue.
1 saw osc, low pass filter all the way down, just a little bit of resonance, and a short filter envelope. 0 attack, short decay, 0 sustain, 0 release.
For those still wondering - this is one of the classic EBM bass lines probably
1 Like
been away for a bit and i missed your post
thanks for uploading that patch
i’m gonna try it out
Here is a good starting point.
Pick a random bass sound/note that you like. Open the sequencer, hit record once and fill up 1·16 with that note. If it’s too fast then use every other note. Too slow? Speed up the bpm. Now, you can go a million ways from here. You can work a climbing bassline for 17·64 or you can experiment with octaves, fifths, or any note to correspond with the beat your going for.
Once you have the sequence you like down, you can play around with the filters to create rises and other things to give your arppegio movement.
The whole idea is to establish the pulse of a song to build from… and deviate to match the drums, or melody your going for.
2 Likes