How to Replicate a Bass Guitar with Keyboards

Video Transcript

"BEN ANDERSON: Hi. I'm Ben Anderson with Expert Village, and I'm here today to talk to you about how to replicate a bass guitar on a keyboard. The keyboard comes with many different sounds, bass guitar being one of them. You normally might think, "Well, if I have a bass guitar sound here, I can just play and play wherever I want," and that's really not the case. It's really important to sit down and figure out how is this bass part going to sound like, and if you have a keyboard like mine, you have many different--like many different styles of bass guitar that you can actually use. So, it's important to determine what style of song this is, what genre it is, and therefore that will determine exactly what type of bass sound you're going to need. Oftentimes, I will use a particular sound called "heart bass" on my keyboard because I find that it sounds a lot more realistic than other basses. Now, there are other different types of sounds you can use. There's a double pick sound on my keyboard that sounds a lot fuller and it gives the impression as if somebody was double picking a bass guitar to give it a much fuller and a much stronger sound, and it sounds a little something like this. So, it's important to determine what type of sound you're going to need for the part that you're going to try to play. In my band, oftentimes I've played it before where I'll be playing keyboard on one keyboard and I'll playing bass guitar on another keyboard all at the same time, and it's really important for me to sit and determine what sounds I'm going to need in order to make the bass sound realistic, because when trying to replicate any other instrument on a keyboard, that's the most important thing is to try to make it sound like you're not playing it on a keyboard; you're actually playing the real instrument."