Dnb Basslines

Hi i have been listening to a lot of dnb recently and in some tracks theres a sub or reece type bass which just holds but gets pitched up or down at some point like pitch bend on a synth, is it possible to make these holding dnb basslines in renoise? many thanks :)

Search for this in another thread as other people have discussed other techniques to do this but here’s a cut and paste of my contribution to said thread which I was too lazy to find. Before I press the proverbial ctll-v i’d like to also point out that 01xy and 02xy should become intimate friends of yours as you proceed.


Reece: you take something like a synth with 2 detuned saw oscillators (up to you), export a .wav with one note or a melody playing (also up to you), and reload it into 2-4 samplers or so.
This lets you send each one into a separate mixer track, so that you can filter each one and use separate effects based on what frequencies are present.
For instance, distortion sounds pretty awful on high frequencies, but sounds good on highly filtered low frequencies. Also, you can add stereo effects to the high frequency component, but you should keep the bass fairly centered in the stereo field. Then you can add things like bandpass filter sweeps and other automated madness. Repeat as many times as is necessary.
Once you’re done, export the whole batch as a .wav and reload it into one sampler. Have fun playing melodies with it.


It’s pretty easy. Basically any subtractive synth will do.

Take two saw waveforms. Detune the second anywhere from 25-50 cents, depending on how wide you want it to sound.

Take the cutoff of a lowpass filter from anywhere between 90hz - 150hz. Just do it to taste, letting through however much harmonics you think sounds “right”.

Crank up the resonance - this is what gives a “reece” it’s really full sound. Be careful when you do this though, as this can get really loud at higher levels. Do it to taste, anywhere from 45%-100% (definitely depending on the filters on whatever synth you use).

There you have it.


In DnB it’s actually synthesis and sampling together. You create a sound you like, you sample it (usually at just one pitch, i.e. no multisamples, so that you can have that “obviously sampled” sound to it), maybe find some bad loop points within it so that it acts rythmically at few pitches (sound whoose loop is 1/8 @ C, will loosely have a loop dancing @ 1/8D on a G below that C etc.), and then use that sound as basis of further synthesis in a sampler.

So synthesize, resample. Layer two or three samples (one that is very subby, pure sine or just lowpassed to death, and then one for mids, one for highs etc.) to your sound etc.

Another trick is to have a simple sligty detuned sqare and lowpassed “sub” sound define your tone, and you layer some other stuff heavily lowpased above it (anything really, from people talking to furniture clanging) and high shelved so that bass sound defines the tone of it. Then resample this sound and you have an easy crazy patch with a lot of random movement.

You could also try time-domain or frequency-domain resynthesis. Won’t work very well for tight basses, but all sorts of other sampled material will work.

Scratch that, I found the thread:

https://forum.renoise.com/t/tracks-im-digging/17269

Scroll down, it turns into a d&b bassline discussion. Good times.

Yeah but i didn’t ask how to make a Reece bass :D What i want to know is how to make the notes glide/hold so it sounds like that. Is there such a feature in renoise?

Haha, doh.