The DJ is working two tunes together, filtering sections in and out, perfectly timing all her tweaks. She reaches for the EQ and cuts out the bass – half the crowd instinctively raise their hands. The air is filled with the sharp, treble-y top end, there’s a huge sonic gap where the bass was, but everyone knows it’s going to come back imminently. The tension builds as the moment approaches; we all know how this works but the effect is irresistible, the DJ reaches for the EQ and drops the bass back in with exquisite timing and the entire room explodes…
Dance music has always put the bass right at the centre of things. From the earliest days of house, with DJs bringing their drum machines to play under disco records to give them some low-end traction, to the continued centrality of bass in so many genres, our love affair with all things deep, rumbling, and booming seems set to continue.
We all know that dropping the bass out and then bringing it back in is one of the simplest and most effective weapons in a DJs arsenal. There’s no doubt it’s a great way to elicit a response from a room, and no doubt it works, but quite why it works is another matter. Early hip hop DJs discovered the power of the break – they noticed that the dancers really let loose at the part of the record when all the instruments drop out leaving just the drums. This is essentially what we are emulating when we cut the bass. When we reach for the EQ, we are taking our place in a long line of low-end manipulators.
One of the reasons that the loss and re-establishment of bass is such a powerful technique could be that it plays with our sense of tension and release. By withdrawing a huge chunk of the sound and creating a vacuum, we create the expectation that the bass will return. This expectation is then savoured as a delicious sonic treat, with the crowd relishing both the suspense and the certainty of knowing that the bass is coming back. Dropping the bass out is like getting the whole room to wait for the other shoe to drop, there’s an inevitability about it – we all know it will be back any moment, but until then we’re all caught up in a sublime extended moment of increasing tension, waiting for our reward when the low-end returns and carries us off once more.
This technique works perfectly well with other parts of the sound spectrum too – cutting the top end or the mids and bringing them back in can perform a similar lift, but is always the bass that seems to have the most impact. Perhaps it is simply because the bass is the most physically powerful part of the audio spectrum, the part that you can genuinely feel in your chest and in your guts when it’s amplified. Bass on a decent large system is experienced physically, viscerally. The effect of a DJ bringing the highs or the mids back in pales next to the sheer weight and power of the amplified low end.
Whatever the reason, we don’t yet seem to have tired of hearing that bass come back, and it doesn’t look as though we will anytime soon. Viva la Bass!
