Origins – Workhorse Synth Bass

Do you have one of those sounds you just can’t replace? No matter how poorly sampled, no matter how small and stretched across your keyboard it is, you just can’t find better? “Better” for me being better suited to all forms of media. In the case of this workhorse bass sampled from a trusty Roland JP8000 that has travelled the world with yours truly (completing most of it’s air-miles with a chap called Peter Andre) and has been surpassed sonically across all aspects of it’s capabilities.

Save for the bass sound.

It’s a subby thing that gives you all sorts of rich bottom (to a point, go to low and like an electric bass it just becomes flop) whilst also being audible on any speaker type. It’s not particularly interesting, it’s not particularly realistic, it kind of doesn’t get in the way. Which is what you need from a bass synth when you don’t have a bass player.

This is part of a new series of samples I’ll be sticking up here called “Origins”. I basically have started again from scratch. Instead of tidying my teenage bedroom of a sample drive I’ve decided to dump it all and re-create all the special samples I’ve made for myself and could do without over the last 25 years.

Here’s a wee film about me starting my own personal sample library from scratch and how I made this bass sample set…