Craft

I put the main emphasis on funk and house. Those are the styles I grew up on, and the styles where a bass loop does the most work.

I use the bass in these loops more as a drum than as a harmonic instrument. What matters is the pocket, the sound quality, the length of notes and rests, what attack, sustain, and release do to the overall feel. A loop repeats, but it can still hold groove and tension if the playing is organic.

In this collection, 75 BPM is the most characteristic tempo. It is also difficult to play, specifically because of how slow it is. Every note has time around it, and there is nowhere to hide. 125 BPM is the opposite difficulty, fast and physical. Funky house lives at that tempo, and within this body of work it is a specialty and a favorite.

I recorded every loop in my home studio in Vienna. The signal path ran through an AKG D112 microphone and a Direct-Out box. Both signals were mixed together.

The loops were part of my daily practice routine. I used drum, keyboard, and guitar loops as playback while practicing, the same way any bass player works in a room. The difference is that I recorded the results. Bass lines I had been carrying around in my head finally had a place to exist.

The collection has 94 series, each in five musical keys, for 470 recordings total. It spans four tempos: 75 BPM, 90 BPM, 110 BPM, and 125 BPM. Recording each loop in five keys means you can shift to all twelve musical keys without significant loss in audio quality.

Key E holds a special position. E is an open string, the lowest tone on the bass. The bass line often needs to be adjusted for Key E compared to the other four keys. The slowest loops, at 75 BPM, produce the longest audio files. Slower tempo means more time passes inside the same 2-bar structure.

Each of the 94 loop series has a unique two- or three-word fantasy name. The names are chosen to make each series distinguishable and memorable, so a person could actually remember which loop is which.

I came up with them during a two-week holiday in Italy, before the Bearly Bass launch. One to two hours a day, clearing my head, listening for what surfaced. The target was ninety-four names a person could actually remember. Looking back, it was like sampling from my own brain. The same thing LLMs do now.

The loop names became stories, and stories became 470 cover images.

I was gigging steadily, but live music stays local. I wanted a way to put the loops out there for anyone to find.

The idea started small. I had been sharing files on Soulseek, the peer-to-peer platform, just putting content from my hard drive out into the world. That impulse, sharing what I had with whoever wanted it, became the seed.

Originally I was going to build a Reason ReFill package. A self-contained pack of bass loops I had played, distributable through the usual channels. But the project outgrew that container. Instead of a ReFill, it became a full web platform for sharing audio loops.

The loops themselves were ideas that had been living in my head with no outlet. Repeating bass lines, figures I could hear but had never recorded. Bearly Bass gave them a place to exist. I wanted other musicians to take them, mash them up with other sounds, fold them into their own productions.

I had no web development experience when I started building this. I had a clear picture in my head of what the platform should look like and what it should do, but I could not build any of it. The ability came on the way, learned piece by piece as the project demanded it.

Building Bearly Bass shifted my career completely. What started as a music project turned into the thing that made me a software engineer. I describe it as having completed my music ambitions. After Bearly Bass, I moved into engineering and did not look back.

Bearly Bass has been the constant through every career shift.

The web platform launched on WordPress in 2011. Then it was rebuilt in Angular. Then as a React single-page application. Then in Next.js. Then came the web3 layer with smart contracts and token minting. Then AI agentic workflows: the content pipeline, the visual system, the cover story generation.

Every time a new technology appeared, Bearly Bass was the project that got rebuilt with it. The same 470 bass grooves from 2010, baked into the code of today.

Everyone can use the loop audio in their own productions, commercially and non-commercially. The audio is publicly licensed and non-exclusive. The loops are shared musical building blocks, closer in spirit to a common groove vocabulary than a restricted catalog.

The audio is good enough to give away.

Each loop is an ERC-721 token on Ethereum. The token does not introduce exclusivity over the audio. Everyone can still use the loops. The token is about provenance and collectibility.

Each loop is presented two ways: with and without a playback groove. The playback version mixes three tracks together: the main bass track, one comping drum track, and one comping harmonic track. The web app includes an Audio Mixer where you can mix the three tracks yourself.

Downloads come as zip files. Each zip contains all five musical keys of a specific loop series. Three audio formats are available: WAV, AIFF, and REX2.

Browse the full loop collection.