What's the easiest way to generate a good bass line once you know the chords it's got to support?
I'm a sax player and got into generative music on iOS just to get some good backing tracks for my performances. So far I'm using mostly Drambo.
I want to start with a set of chords and spend most my time on the synth pads, but still want to spin up a good bass line to put underneath it without a ton of effort. (Lazy SOB!)
Here's the work flow I'm striving for: 1) Decide on a chord progression, 2) enter the chords into the sequencer in a Drambo clip, 3) send that to a synth (in this case 4Pockets' Copperhead), 4) send the roots of that progression to a second app/synth to get a decent bass line.
Step 4 is where I'm stuck. Can't find a good bass line generator for Drambo. (Reason has Bassline Generator, but I want don't want to get sucked into their closed-garden, monthly subscription $$ environment.)
I have tried using the Arp module...ran into some complications which I'm about to document in another posting.
Yesterday I found this video where LoganJacob spun up a very usable bass line using Axon 2: https://youtu.be/IflJ9IX9UkI. But it dwells on single root note, i.e., a single chord...I want to move it around to three other chords. So far controlling the root note is proving to be a science project. Maybe it's not quite the right tool for my use case??
Given this context, what's the easiest way to identify four chords and get back a decent bass line when using Drambo or any other polyphonic sequencer?
Comments
The easiest way would be to add in your chords where you need them,
when you’re happy with the chord progression,
copy the chord progression to another track and to delete everything except for the root notes.
Extend out the note lengths and add an ARP module.
For generative stuff I often use the following :
MIDI Chance module at a fairly low setting, so note(s) only rarely get picked from your chords; followed by MIDI Latch module (depending on your chords); followed by ARP module to play the picked note(s) in certain order; and either another Chance module with a fairly high setting to ‘skip a note’ here and there, or controlling the frequency of the ARP by an external clock (Clock generator + Bernoulli gate) to ‘skin a step’
Also just for the sake of it I like to occasionally insert foreign notes by offsetting random notes with MIDI transpose module, but that can be undesirable in many genres :)
Bassline is more about groove than about notes
what's important is when to play a note and when not to play a note. ;)
it doesn't really matter what notes you play ...
think rhythm not melody
+1
hehe
yes things start to bore the hell out you if everything is always nice 😴
thats why im against all these scale things
in the end it makes very streamlined music, no happy accidents because you played the "wrong" notes (that was interesting, do that again)
its all the same soup
...
...
+1
Not sure if you're looking for drambo only solutions, but I have used Rozetta Bassline and Audiomodern's Riffer with great success for generative basslines.
More tweaking with Riffer but also more rewarding.
Riffer also gets my vote. Much more control than Rozetta Bassline.