Hello You.
Learning what bass does while stood next to a speaker at JB's in Dudley (UK), back in 2002, as the Wildhearts played MY BABY IS A HEADF**K. The kick drum and the bass guitar weren't something just heard. They were something that attacked you, juddered through the floor and came at you simultaneously. And it was long before wearing earplugs to gigs was a thing, ear ringing for days. Same thing from the other end of (very poor) headphones: Oxide & Neutrino, BOUND 4 DA RELOAD (CASUALTY).
Bass changes how a song feels. It decides the hype. It decides where your head goes, and where your chest goes, because it infiltrates your system.
Two playlists at the bottom this week. One for the bass heads, one for the guitar crowd.
What makes it nasty
Nasty is a compliment. Same family as disgusting and obscene. It means a bassline has gone past good and into your body, twisting your face. A line so inexplicably nasty, you look like you're sucking sour lemons.
It's usually three things stacked on top of each other.
Weight. The sub. Roughly 20 to 60Hz, the part you feel more than you hear, it will buzz through you.
Grit. Distortion and harmonics, so the bass cuts through instead of just humming under everything else. Nasty is, quite literally, dirty.
Movement. Slides, wobbles, and where it sits against the drums.
Bass is also the timekeeper, even when it doesn't feel like it. A 2014 study found the brain notices timing slips more in low notes than in high ones, and people tapping along corrected more when the low note came early. Which might be why bass ended up in the rhythm section.
And speed changes the flavor. A rough map of where the nasty lives:
Speed garage: around 128 to 135 BPM
Bassline: around 135 to 140
Grime, dubstep and drill: around 140, but often felt at half that
Jungle and drum & bass: around 160 to 175
Want to hear it clean? Skream's MIDNIGHT REQUEST LINE for weight, Renegade's TERRORIST for grit, T2's HEARTBROKEN for movement. All on the new playlist.
A basic beginning
In the 60s at Motown, James Jamerson swapped the upright for a P-Bass and stopped just playing root notes. Busy, syncopated, melodic. He played on a ridiculous number of number ones.
Then in 1980 Roland put out the TR-808, a drum machine that flopped because it didn't sound like real drums. Cheap secondhand ones ended up with hip hop producers, who tuned the kick down and stretched it out until the kick drum became the bassline. Drums and bass, finally the same thing.
Almost every bassline you love is built on something somebody else made. The groove comes out of Black American music, jazz and blues and Motown and funk. Jamaica built on American R&B. The UK built on Jamaica, Detroit and hip hop. The problem is who gets the credit and who gets paid. The Amen break, six seconds of Gregory Coleman drumming on a 1969 B-side, is the backbone of jungle and drum & bass. Neither Coleman nor the song's copyright holder ever saw royalties from the samples. Coleman died broke in 2006. In 2015 a UK DJ crowdfunded about £24,000 for Richard Spencer, the band's leader, as a thank you. Not a royalty. A thank you.
Bass you feel in your joints
A speaker doesn't really play bass. It shoves air.
The cone moves forward and back, squashing and stretching the air in front of it. High notes are tiny, fast pushes. A low note is a slow, enormous one, and to move enough air for proper sub you need big cones, or a lot of them. Hence sound systems that look like a wall of wardrobes.
Bass waves are also huge. A 40Hz note is about 8.6 meters long. Most rooms are smaller than one bass wave, so the bass stops travelling across the room and the whole space fills up instead, like a balloon. Your car is the extreme version (which is why a modest sub rattles a Corsa banger and sounds weak in your living room). Bass also piles up in corners, so there's usually one spot in a room that booms and a spot a meter away that goes oddly quiet.
When McMaster's LIVELab secretly switched very low speakers on and off during a live set, people danced 11.8% more while they were on.
So next gig, find the speaker, but make sure you have some earplugs in. We don't want any complaints.
See you next Thursday.
If you've made it all the way here, you owe us your favorite bassline.
The reading, if you want to go deeper:
How Renegade's Terrorist created a blueprint for jungle, DJ Mag
Want to fire up the dance floor? Play low-frequency bass, McMaster University
Not into jungle and drill? There's one for the guitar crowd too.
For the bass heads, here's the main one: jungle, bassline, grime, dubstep, the lot.
