Make a pulsing bass with GForce Axxess

Get mechanical, with a garage-inspired bass patch, which gets right to the pulsing heart of the Axxess synthesiser

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One of the notorious legacies of ARP synthesisers, is their ability to create beefy bass sounds. There have been many examples of ARP’s being employed for bass duties; Japanese synth-pop masters, the Yellow Magic Orchestra, often used an ARP Odyssey for basses, as did German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk.

It was recently revealed that the extraordinary bass sound from Thriller, by Michael Jackson, was actually provided by an ARP 2600, and not a Minimoog, as had been thought to be the case for many, many years! Who made this claim? The very person who programmed the bassline in the recording session, alongside the person who played it live on the session. With so much provenance for ARP synthesisers and their amazing bass credentials, it’s time for us to create an earthy bass patch, with GForce’s incredible Axxess synthesiser plugin, originally based on the ARP Axxe, and now part of our Plugin Suite.

Our patch harks back to the spirit of ’90s garage, but could easily find content bedfellows in any commercial production today. Combining a saw and square source with a sub-oscillator, we’re going to program a pulse width modulation (PWM) routing, that will help to maintain drive, in time with the tempo of our track. So grab your copy of Axxess, load up your DAW, and let’s huffle back in time, with a large pinch of garage swagger and energy!

> Step by step

Make a pulsing bass with GForce Axxess

1 Once you have your copy of the GForce Axxess loaded into your DAW, open the preset browser from the top of the plugin window. To set up a default template, click on Init Patch on the bottom left-hand side of the window. This will initialise our sound to a single sawtooth, with a wide open filter.