How to Make a Trap Style 808 Bass

Good Old Roland TR-808

Trap music emerged primarily from the southern United States as a subgenre of Hip Hop. It is a genre filled with a hard attitude that you can feel in the sound of the brass, triangle, triplet hi-hats, powerful kicks, snappy snares, and low-end 808 bass samples that are used when composing tracks. When making trap music, the drum samples of choice usually originate from the good old Roland TR-808 Drum Machine. Moreover, one of the distinct characteristics of the trendy Trap music genre is, without any doubt, the boomy bass sound with lots of low-end frequencies. Do you want to learn how to create that Trap-style 808 bass?  

Let's Start Trapping!

In the following tutorial, I will show you how to make that deep and powerful bass sound from scratch using Massive by Native Instruments. Later, I will combine it with a pattern (free for download on the link below). From choosing the proper waveforms to voicing, effects, and beyond, I will show you how to set the suitable envelopes to create an excellent foundation for the trap-style bass sound you can use in your music production. So, let's start trapping!

 Firstly, let's start by selecting the new sound from the upper menu of NI Massive. I will go to the first oscillator section and select the sine-square waveform. Now, let's push the pitch down to -24. After that, we can already hear nice and fat sine wave bass.

~Initial Sine Wave  

Trap Style Production

Furthermore, let's make it sound warmer by going to the effects section and selecting Tele Tube distortion. Secondly, I'll increase the low end with the built-in equalizer. Moving on to the envelope 4 section, let's set the parameters by moving the attack to the left. Besides, I will set the decay at about 2 o'clock, level to the left, and give it a bit of release. After that, let's modulate the envelope 1 section by dragging and dropping the navigator icon to the pitch of oscillator 1. After setting the parameters similar to the envelope 4 section, we can hear that the punch is finally introduced. 

~Envelope Pitch Modulation  

In the end, processing the sound with some 3rd party effects could be helpful. For this reason, I will use Exciter by Izotope to add a bit more warm distortion. In addition, I will add an instance of OTT by Xfer to slightly compress the sound.  

~Trap Style Bass with Saturation and Compression

Finally, let us hear how the processed sound sounds like this in the entire mix.  

~Full Mix