UK bass music continues to feed scenes that reach far wider than the island's shores.

For this first edition of UK Bass Music Essentials from Soul Rush Records, we’re delving into the sounds of UK funky, deep house, UK garage, and Afro beats, influenced amongst others by Justin Martin, Roska, Lil Silva, Quentin Harris, and Dennis Ferrer.

We sampled recordings of real-life textures and instruments from wind chimes and bongos to rainsticks and woodblocks to bring in a human and slightly acoustic feel to our electronic beats. All were then processed with vintage parallel compression, light reverbs, tape saturation, and limiting with state-of-the-art plugins to give the beats power and character.

All of our melodic loops were processed with different synths and plugins, from synthesised pianos and vintage compressors to sampling uncommon string instruments and sending them through tape machines and vinyl saturators.

We created unique bass sounds by sampling an 808 drum machine and sine waves - running them through a ton of distortion plugins and filters to create whistling resonant harmonics layered on top of the sub melody.