Future Bass

What it is

Flume's first album came out in 2012 on a Sydney label and sounded like nothing on a festival stage. Two years later half the internet was making chords that wobbled. This is the strand that took the halftime frame from trap, threw out the aggression, and put a detuned saw chord with a fast pitch and filter wobble on top of it, played from a sampler so the notes bend against each other. San Holo, Illenium, Louis the Child, Marshmello and a very large quantity of SoundCloud are the shape of it. The drums are less four to the floor than anything else in this family: a snare on beat three, a kick that syncopates around it, and hats that play the back half of every beat and leave the front of it alone. The chords do the work, and the drums exist to make room for them.

What it sounds like

Soft and enormous at once. The chord stack is the record: seven or nine detuned saws per voice with an LFO on the pitch running at an eighth note, a filter following it, and heavy ducking so the whole thing breathes. Vocals are pitched up and formant-shifted into something that could be a synth. The snare is a big layered clap with a short plate, the kick is round rather than clicky, and the hats are quiet and live in the second half of the beat. There is a lot of space in the low mids, because the chords occupy everything from 300Hz upward and nothing is allowed to compete. Reverb runs long and is summed to mono so it does not smear the width.

Key elements

• The wobbling chordDetuned saws with an LFO on pitch at an eighth note and a second on the filter, both retriggered per note. That wobble is what people mean by the name, and it is one modulation routing.
• A snare on 3 and nowhere elseBeat three of each bar, plus a ghost on the a of 4 of bar one. There is no backbeat on beat 2 in the loop, which is what makes the tempo read as half of what it actually is.
• Hats in the back half of the beatClosed hats on the and and the a of each beat with the beat itself and the e left alone. Eighteen hits across two bars, none of them above 72.
• A syncopating kickEight kicks and only two of them on a beat. The kick works around the chord stabs rather than marking time, which is why a track like this cannot be mixed the way house is.
• Pitched vocal chopsA one word sample, formant-shifted up and played as a voice inside the chord. It fills the slot a lead would fill, and it is why so many of these records sound like singing without a singer.

How to get them

• The chordSeven saws, detune 30 cents, then an LFO at an eighth note on oscillator pitch with a depth of about 15 cents and another on filter cutoff. Set both to retrigger on note-on or the wobble drifts out of time.
• Sidechain20dB of ducking from the kick with a 250ms release, applied to the chords, the vocal chop and the reverb returns together. At 150 the chord is only at full level for about a sixteenth.
• SnareA clap and a snare layered with a filtered noise tail, into a 900ms plate high-passed at 700Hz. Keep the body around 200Hz small, because the chords need that space more than the snare does.
• HatsProgram the and and the a of each beat and leave the downbeat and the e clear. Velocities between 44 and 72 and no higher, because a loud hat here fights the chord wobble for attention.
• Vocal chopsTake one syllable, resample it across two octaves, shift the formant up three or four semitones and play it as the top voice of the chord. Then duck it with the kick like everything else.
• Let the chords changeFour chords over eight bars with at least one inversion among them. The wobble is a texture and it stops being interesting on its own in roughly thirty seconds.

Reference points

Flume, Cashmere Cat, San Holo, Louis the Child, Illenium, Marshmello, and the Future Classic and Monstercat catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.