Bassline

I want to travel back in time to 1700 and give J.S. Bach a 1964 Moog synthesizer.  I am so taken by the idea of the electronic world meeting the inception of analog music.  When one of my students recently asked me how to write a good bassline for the electronic genre, a feeling of nostalgia took over and I found myself wanting Bach to answer.

The more I thought about it the harder it felt to answer his question.  What I really wanted to do was look at him wide-eyed like a deer in the headlights and whisper “it’s just a feeling” while injecting him by virtual osmosis with all of the thoughts I was having.  For obvious reasons that wasn’t a good idea so instead I told him to keep it simple.  In spite of having the rest of the lesson to discuss it, I also didn’t want to flood his brain with the overwhelming variety of perspectives that were arguing in my mind at the time, so I added on that the complexity of the sound (the more interesting and original the better) was an especially important aspect of bass in the genre he was exploring.

For my brain-child, electronic music is very much about the design of the sounds and the specific ways that they are arranged and packaged.  There are multiple voices, typically a minimum of 10 weaving together at any given moment, and while that may seem like a lot it really isn’t very many at all.  This fairly parallels the number of voices (not musicians) in the average symphony orchestra (typically 10-15+; this number is largely dependent upon length, time period and composer).

In this moment I felt that Bach would understand my predicament.  Generally speaking, simple baselines leading to good music is a universal truism across genres.  The role of the bass in any given arrangement is to provide harmonic support for all other instrumentation and when that many voices are sounding, a complex bassline can make things muddy and challenging to appreciate.  The number of elements that go into making that baseline the perfect kind of simple however constitutes a very long list.  So really, what I should have said is “the perfect bassline for any given musical arrangement is a very specific kind of simple and the best way of finding exactly that kind of simple is up to you.”