How to Write a Great Bassline for your Chord Progression

Struggling to get the feel? Find your track’s footing with our guide to composing or programming the right bassline in your DAW

There are lots of skills needed to produce music. Can every producer be expected to be a synth programmer, a finger drummer, a songwriter, a mixing engineer and a mastering engineer, all at the same time? While it’s possible to get a handle on a few of the techniques and abilities required for producing music, being a genius at all of them is a lot to ask of anyone.

Basslines are a particularly good example of this. Not everyone will automatically know what makes a bassline tick and groove, but they might be great at some of the other, surrounding skills that are necessary to complete the whole picture.

With this guide, we’ll show you the ropes of bassline creation, and help you to move from a set of chords to a matching bassline that underpins the whole track in a solid way.

 

Use the notes in your chords

Before we get into groove, sound selection, and frequency considerations, let’s start at the very beginning.

If you’ve ever opened up a DAW, loaded a synth, and stared blankly at a MIDI piano roll trying to come up with a bassline, you’re not alone. Writing a good bassline can be tricky. But luckily, there are a few solid tricks to kickstart your creativity – and one of the best is simply to use the notes in your chords.

By using notes from your chords, you 100% know that every note in your bassline will musically work with your chord progression.

Let’s start really simple and build a bassline using just the root notes of a chord sequence. Here we have a simple chord sequence of Dm, C#m, F and Fm7 being played on Baby Audio’s BA-1 Synth.

The root notes of these chords are D, C#, F and F. So, let’s write a simple bassline made up of eighth notes following the root note of each chord

Nice. Straight away, we have a bassline that works melodically with our chord pattern, and it was super easy! It’s a strong foundation; however, it’s not exactly going to win any awards for innovation. So, let’s add some movement with passing notes.

Passing notes are like musical stepping stones that help your bassline move smoothly from the root note of one chord to the next.

In our bassline example, we’ll add a passing note at the end of the second and fourth bars, changing the final C# to an E, and the final F to a G#.

Now, not only is the bassline a little more exciting, but it also flows more smoothly, creating a journey as we move from one chord to the next.

You’ll notice that in choosing our passing notes, we’ve used notes from our chords. E is a note in the C#m chord, and G# appears in an Fm7 chord – this helps the passing notes to gel extra pleasingly with the chords.

Once you’ve mastered root notes and passing tones, try integrating other chord tones like thirds, fifths, or sevenths for more melodic movement.

Of course, there aren’t any rules here, and venturing out of the notes in your chord progression can lead to interesting musical results. However, if you’re new to the world of bassline composition, it may be best to keep things simple to start with.

 

Bonus tip: use octave jumps

If your bassline still feels a little bit flat, throw in some octave jumps – this is where you take a note that is already in your bassline, and you simply shift it up 12 semitones

This can be especially effective when used in place of passing notes, smoothing the transition between chords in your progression, and that’s exactly what we’ve done to the bassline below.

These octave jumps add instant interest and drama, and signify that a change is coming as we reach the end of each chord. You’ll find this technique used a lot in new wave records, but it’s also a technique employed by producers working in contemporary genres across the spectrum.

 

Play off the rhythm of your chords

Bass isn’t just about notes – it’s also about rhythm and groove. In fact, in bands, bass is often considered part of the "rhythm section" along with drums. While basslines carry melody, their primary function is often to support and lock in with the rhythmic backbone of your track.

Of course, basslines come in all rhythmic shapes and sizes. At one end of the spectrum you have busy, staccato funk basslines, and at the other you’ll find heavy sustained bass sounds in drum and bass and other dance genres.

The rhythm of your bassline can often depend on the rhythm of your chords. A good rule of thumb to follow is:

• If your chords are rhythmic, use a sustained bass
• If your chords are sustained, use rhythmic bass.

In the previous section, we built a rhythmic bassline to sit under some sustained chords. Let’s flip it on its head. Now we have the same chords, but arranged as a staccato, off-beat rhythm that you’d commonly find in house tracks.

So, let’s add a sustained bass line. Probably the most famous sustained bass sound is the “reese bass” – a detuned saw bass sound that’s ubiquitous in electronic music. It’s popular for a reason, so let’s use one here.

You can use almost any two oscillator synth with a detune function to make a reese, but this time we’ll reach for Phase Plant by Kilohearts. It's per-oscillator unison makes building a reese bass a breeze.

When writing a sustained bassline, we can use the same melodic principles discussed in the first section. We’ll follow the root note of each chord, but add a little bit of variation at the end of bar two and four with an octave jump, and a passing note.

 

Glide away…

To add more character to your sustained bassline, try adding glide (also called portamento) to your bass patch. This adds that signature slide sound that’s particularly closely associated with genres like drill, but can be found in almost any electronic genre.

 

Consider your drums

The drums, especially the kick, are the other half of your rhythm section—and your bass needs to work with them. A great way to create rhythmic synergy is to find "pockets" in your beat where your bass can play without clashing.

For example, if your kick drum hits on every beat (four-to-the-floor), try placing your bass notes off the beat – perhaps on the sixteenth note just after the kick. This gives each sound space, both rhythmically and sonically. This works best when working with shorter, staccato bass sounds.

From a mixing perspective, this also reduces frequency masking, where two instruments occupy the same frequency range and interfere with each other, and less clashing means a cleaner mix..

If you do find that your kick and bass are clashing when you come to mixing, EQs like FabFilter Pro-Q 4 can help by showing frequencies between channels, helping you to carve out space for each element and avoid spectral masking.

 

Choose a bass sound that works with your chords

Time to turn our attention away from musical concepts like pitch and rhythm and towards the production-oriented world of sound selection.

The way your bassline sounds can go a long way to helping it work not only with your chord progression, but also with your track as a whole.

A great approach is to match the sonic character of your bass to your chords.

For example, suppose you’ve written your chord pattern on a vintage or analogue keyboard-style instrument like the Rhodes V8. In that case, it makes sense to match that vibe and reach for a sonically similar synth such as the Moog Mariana, which channels Moog’s deep legacy as hardware synth pioneers, bringing a rich, analogue style sound to your DAW.

Ample Bass series by Ample Sound is a great place to start.

On the flip side, if your chords are coming from a glossy, digital wavetable synth – like you might use in modern drum and bass or dubstep – you’ll want a bass sound that feels equally up to date. Here, a contemporary bass patch is likely to work well. To achieve this kind of sound, a cutting-edge soft synth like Arturia Pigments 6 will be your best bet.