Creating a bass sound using Novation V-Station

Welcome to this tutorial on how to make a bass in V-Station, we'll work through making a buzzy dance/hardcore/hard dance bass you can use in any of your productions.

The first thing you should do before we start is set up your MIDI pattern. You can use a basic dance 4/4 offbeat bassline for this tutorial.

Now open v-station and choose a user preset you can usually find them after the standard presets, these act as init presets and are a good place to start as the only usually have a saw oscillator.

Now we can start creating our bass, I usually have a kick drum that I like already set up so I can test my bass - this is a good environment to work in within your chosen sequencer. The bass we are going to create is a standard hard dance/house bass.

Start by turning the first osc waveform to Sawtooth, then lower the octave of it to -1.

This will act as your sub osc! turn the semitone down to -12

Turn the osc 2 level upto about 33 and turn the octave down to -1, then turn the semi down to -12 and the detune left to -50.

You should now hear the bass has a certain tone already, this is very important as if you was going to use the bass in a track you wouldn't want the bass to keep phasing and your bass will most likely be in mono.

The main dynamic of the bass comes now, in the FX section of V-Station go to distortion, notch the level up to 51 and bring the comp down to 30, these act as both distortion and compression, what we are doing is sharpening the sound.

Now we can mess with the EQ, so in the EQ section of fx change the level(EQ Depth) to 21 and the freq to 13. We have now just added a slight bass notch.

That is it you should now have a fine dance/hardcore/hard dance bass you can use in any of your productions.

Have fun with this bass and look forward to more tutorials soon.

Mark is a avid DJ who loves to mix and make tracks with various synth patches and reason refills. Mark works for DMS in the UK who sell various DJ Sample packs and MIDI producer packs.