FIELDWORK / 009  ·  TECH HOUSE ROOM

Make the bass talk.
Then say the hook.

In tech house the bassline is the lead and the vocal is one line said with attitude. This room builds both: a bass that says wah, ow and yeah through a formant filter, and a mic booth that turns three words of yours into eight chart-style hooks. Then it makes the two take turns.

Skip to the mic ↓

01 / THE TALKING BASS

Fourteen loops that never touch the kick.

Every loop obeys one grammar: no note starts on a kick, notes never overlap, and the words go where the phrase answers itself. The tests check all fourteen, and every generated loop, against it.

THE LOOP THAT CARRIES FIVE MINUTES

Offbeat rubber

BAR 01 / 16

The voice

Keep it alive — same loop, eight moves across the phrase

These count notes and time, measured on the phrase you are hearing. They say whether the rules held, not whether it bangs. That part is your ears.

02 / SAY THE HOOK

Three words. Eight hooks.

Say a short line into your mic: "turn it up", "let me see you move", your own. It never leaves this page. A robot can say one for you while you try it out.

  • 2–5 syllables. A command or a question.
  • Say it, don't sing it. Attitude beats pitch.
  • Leave a gap between words so the chop finds them.
  • Close to the mic, quiet room.
Robot: "turn it up"Click a syllable to hear it

Pick a treatment — each one plays in the loop above, in time

03 / TAKE IT TO ABLETON

Everything you hear, as files.

  1. Bass MIDI carries pitch bend (set your synth's bend range to ±12), CC74 for the mouth and CC1 for the vowel. Map them in Serum 2 or Live's Auto Filter.
  2. Vocal syllables: drag the syllable-*.wav files together onto the C1 pad of a Drum Rack. They fill C1, C♯1, D1… in order, so the vocal MIDI plays your hook. Pitched treatments (Mantra, Chipmunk, Tuned) need their rendered WAV instead.
  3. Stems have the sidechain pump baked into the bass. Leave headroom: the preview bus is not a master.

04 / BUILD IT IN YOUR SYNTH

The talking bass, in Serum 2.

  1. Osc A: saw, 2 unison voices, detune ~0.12. Osc B: square, −1 octave, level ~50%. Sub: sine, on its own, no filter.
  2. Filter: one of the Formant types, drive ~40%. MIDI-learn its frequency to CC74 (the mouth) and its vowel control to CC1. The exported MIDI already moves both.
  3. Env 2 → filter freq +20%, decay 250 ms: the "w" at the start of a word.
  4. Pitch: bend range ±12, portamento off. The drop stabs are written as bend.
  5. FX: Distortion (tube, ~30%) before an EQ that high-passes the character at 95 Hz. Leave the sub dry.
  6. In Live without Serum: Operator saw → Auto Filter. Use a vowel/formant type if your version has one, otherwise band-pass, and map it to the same CCs.

05 / WRITING THE LINE

What a chart hook does.

  1. It is an instruction or a question. "Turn it up", "Where you at", "Move your body". The crowd is the subject.
  2. It ends on an open vowel. "up" stops; "go-o" can be held, chopped and pitched.
  3. It fits in one bar and repeats at least four times before it changes.
  4. It takes turns with the bass. When one talks, the other listens: try Call & response with Bass makes room.
  5. Recorded vocals you didn't make need a licence. Your own voice, or a pack you own, is safe to release.