Reese’s Pieces: How to Create Kevin Saunderson’s Legendary Bass Patch

Reese bass is an often-confused term that crops up in dance music production usually within the jungle and Drum’n’Bass communities, but can be found in glitch hop, bass-house, dubstep and virtually any genre that is obsessed with bass.

There are countless YouTube tutorials on creating the perfect Reese sound, commonly built up of stacked super-saw oscillators with numerous parallel band-reject filters being modulated, drenched in unison detune and clipping distortion.

Of course, this modern flip is a perfectly valid sound, and can be heard in tracks from Noisia to Limewax, Technical Itch to Spor and many others. However, the original term actually refers to a sound sampled from a 1988 techno track by Kevin Saunderson under the alias Reese:

On the original pressing there were a number of different mixes, in particular the third track on the A-side. Colloquially known as the Bassapella, it had the bassline isolated without drums making it ripe for sampling:

The is a wavy low-passed bass sound easily achieved with basic subtractive synthesis. Often mis-attributed to a Roland Juno 106, Kevin actually clears this up for us in an interview claiming the sound came from a Casio CZ-5000.

The patch has a nice, subtle movement to it and some harmonics in the mid-range and has plenty of bottom end. These characteristics made it perfect for lots of dance music. Kevin had this to say about it:

I created the Reese bass from that [Casio synth], and drum ‘n’ bass DJs have used it over the years… I’d be getting into the oscillators, but it was trial and error. I didn’t know a lot about that kind of stuff, but I knew it affected the way the original patch sounded. You just messed around with every button! …So there was no real theory behind it, besides experimentation to make something happen differently to what was was already there… I can usually tell when I have it right just by how the impact of the sound feels when I play on the keyboard, whether it’s a deep Reese bass or any other type of bass.

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How to make a Reese

We can approximate a decent Reese sound with near-any basic synthesiser. Here’s the original bassline MIDI at 122 bpm. There’s a number of different ways can you achieve a reese-like sound, using pulse-width modulation or detuning two sawtooths, but I’ve founding using sine or triangle wave with unison and some saturation.

Since originally writing this article back in 2015, the excellent Owen Palmer made this Reese deconstruction video, and gets closer than my original version made in Live’s Analog.

Resampling

Over the next 10 to 15 years, countless tracks have appeared with various samples and resamples of Kevin’s bass – perhaps one of the most well known examples of this is 1994’s Terrorist by Renegade and Ray Keith. This was released on the hugely influential label Moving Shadow and has had a number of reissues and appearances on compilations:

Mutant Jazz

In 1995 T Power and MK-Ultra released their seminal Mutant Jazz:

However it was Trace’s Roller Instinct mix from the same year that really ruffled feathers in the Reese resampling world:

Trace utilises a more distorted sound (he confirmed to me the distortion used for the Rollers Instinct mix was a Boss SD-1). The tech step classic Mutant Revisited from 1996 that’s a more widely known mix:

Let’s recreate our own Mutant Jazz… For simplicity, I’m going to record two bars of C1 to a new audio track. At this stage you can dirty the sound up how you want, adding vinyl noise, tape hiss, sample rate/bit reduction, EQ, compression etc. etc. Bear in mind anything you add can’t be undone so be sure to save your steps as you go along.

Next, add the resulting file to a sampler instrument. Kontakt or Logic’s Sampler will do but I’m going to use Live’s Sampler instrument. Be sure to set the file’s root key to C1 (or whatever note you recorded).

I’m going to enable ‘Snap’ and set the sustain mode to ‘Loop back and forth’. In the Filter/Global panel, disable any Vol<Vel (velocity-controlling volume modulation) and set the voices to 1. In the Pitch/Osc panel, set the Glide to Glide (rather than Off or Portamento) and move the time to 100ms to get a smooth transition between notes.

To get the distortion sound, I’ve tweaked Live’s Saturator’s Mid-Range Phattner preset and added some Overdrive afterwards. Experiment with Glide times and even adding another pitch LFO to get more warbly sounds.

Cutslo

In 1997 Ed Rush, Optical and Fierce released Locust on Prototype records, pushing the tech step idiom into faster, more distorted territories.

However their ‘98 mix Cutslo, an anagram of Locust (which I oddly can’t find on Spotify) is where we pick up. Using the same Reese as Locust (albeit even more warped), it contained a section in the first breakdown where the bass was isolated and, like Saunderson’s original track, easy to get a nice, clean cut for reuse:

This can be heard in John B’s Up All Night from 2001, but there are countless examples:

Let’s give this a go in Live. The tempo is 176 bpm. This is a wetter and even more distorted sound. Firstly let’s enable the Sampler’s filter. I’ve added a bit of resonance to the low-pass filter and used the built in sine shaper to drive the sound a bit further.

The filter can be opened over time, and placed before the distortion can create some interesting overtones. Using a combination of Live’s Overdrive and Amp to emulate the mid-range distortion, you can finish the sound off with the built-in Reverb and, voila!, ‘97-era tech step.

Massive thanks to Tim Cant who helped with researching and sourcing some of the material for this. Couldn’t have done it without him.