Vital · Bass design · Recreation

How to Make a Bass Like Bou & Mark XTC’s “Breathe” in Vital

To make a horn-like bass in the style of Bou & Mark XTC’s “Breathe” in Vital, automate the pitch wheel down two semitones across each note, run the oscillator through a steep 24 dB low-pass filter, and let a triggered LFO open the cutoff. Automating that LFO’s speed gives you the rhythm. Then use the Saws for Days wavetable with mono unison, a little white noise, chorus, distortion and EQ, and finish with post-processing and resampling. This is our own recreation, step by step, with the settings from the screen and audio of every stage.

By DNB Academy · Updated 23 October 2026 · 9 min read · Vital (free) + Ableton Live, intermediate

This is a recreation for learning, inspired by the bass at the end of each bar in “Breathe”. It’s our own patch, built from an init preset. For a broader map of bass types, see our drum and bass bass guide.

Our recreation of the horn-like “Breathe” bass in Vital, from an init patch to a resampled audio take. Every step below links to the moment in the video.

1.Set up the pitch-bend movement

The horn-like character starts with pitch: each note slides down two semitones while it plays. In Vital that is just the pitch wheel, with the bend range at 2, automated from your DAW.

Open an initialised Vital (watch at 1:06). We set up the movement first and only pick the sound later. Vital’s bend range is 2 semitones by default (the BEND box at the bottom reads 2), so automating the pitch wheel from the centre to the bottom drops the note by two semitones. In Ableton, draw that automation as a straight ramp down across the length of the note, then flat at the bottom.

2.Add a 24 dB filter and an LFO on the cutoff

The second movement is a filter that opens and closes on every note. A steep 24 dB low-pass with no resonance, driven by a triggered LFO, gives the bass its “breathing” vowel-like shape.

Turn on filter 2 and route oscillator 1 through it (watch at 1:27). Bring the resonance all the way down and switch it to a steeper slope: Analog 24 dB on screen. Then map LFO 1 to the filter’s cutoff. LFO 1 is in Trigger mode, so it restarts with each note. Experiment a little with its shape: ours ends up as a curved rise to a peak and a slower fall.

3.Create the rhythm by automating the LFO speed

Instead of a tempo-synced LFO, we free the LFO and automate how fast it runs. Speeding it up and slowing it down within the note is what turns one filter sweep into a rhythmic, talking pattern.

Change the LFO a little, then turn off its tempo sync so the frequency is set in seconds (watch at 1:56); the screen shows 0.400 secs at that point. Now you’re free to experiment. Back in Ableton, automate LFO 1 Frequency (watch at 2:08). Our shape goes up, then down, restarts, goes down, back up, and then sustains for the rest of the note. While you’re designing your own sound, you can change this shape freely; those two automations are the two main movements of the sound.

4.Pick the wavetable and set mono unison

With the movement in place, choose the tone. We use Vital’s Saws for Days wavetable, then find a frame that has plenty of low-mid harmonics but still keeps a fundamental, and widen it with unison that stays mono.

Load Saws for Days on oscillator 1 (watch at 2:49). It has a very cool overtone. Click the oscillator’s display to switch to the spectrum view, which shows you the harmonics. The first frame isn’t what we want: move through the wavetable until you find a frame with more harmonics in the low mids that also contains a fundamental, because the starting one doesn’t.

Next, add 4 voices of unison (watch at 3:27). We don’t want a stereo effect here, so open the Advanced tab and bring stereo unison all the way down. You will still hear some odd phasing, so also bring the unison detune all the way down, to 0%.

From here it’s partly about getting lucky with the phases. Phase randomisation is still on, so some notes come out with strange results and others give you exactly the sound you want. That is why we resample at the end instead of relying on one MIDI note.

5.Add a little white noise

A quiet noise layer through the same filter adds air and grit, and it moves with the LFO because it shares the cutoff.

Turn on the sampler, which loads White Noise by default (watch at 4:00). Bring its level down and route it to filter 2 so it mixes with oscillator 1 in the filter.

6.Chorus, distortion and EQ inside Vital

Inside Vital, the effects stay simple: a chorus kept mono for extra movement in the harmonics, Soft Clip distortion for weight, and an EQ before the patch goes out to the DAW.

In the Effects tab (watch at 4:19), turn on the chorus. Again, we don’t want it to go stereo, so bring the spread down and the mix down too. If you’re leaving the recreation behind to make your own sound, a stereo chorus is perfectly valid. The chorus adds a bit more movement to some of the harmonics. Next, turn on the distortion (Soft Clip on screen) and drive it. Then add the EQ, and bring Vital’s output level down so the patch doesn’t hit your DAW too hot.

Once more, the retrigger of oscillator 1’s voices decides a lot (watch at 5:13). Keep experimenting with the wavetable frame until a note sounds right.

7.Post-processing: noise, multiband distortion, EQ and soft clipping

The post-processing chain after Vital is short: Erosion for hiss, multiband distortion on the mids only, an EQ to bring out the harmonics you like, and a saturator in soft-clip mode.

First, Ableton’s Erosion (watch at 5:35). It’s a noise generator, set around 3,000 Hz just to add more hiss to the sound: on screen it reads Wide Noise, 3.61 kHz, width 0.30 and amount 34.4.

Next comes iZotope Trash 2 in multiband mode (watch at 6:02). There’s nothing on the lows and nothing on the highs. The middle band runs from around 500 Hz up to about 2.8 kHz (548 Hz to 2.87 kHz on screen) and uses Crunchy Grunge from the Drive folder, with a drive of 3.3 and the curve pulled up a little higher.

Then an EQ Eight (watch at 6:53). This is simply to boost the harmonics we like and bring down those we don’t, so ours has narrow bell boosts with a dip between them. Watch out for clipping: if the boosts push it over, bring the EQ’s gain down (ours is at -6 dB) and keep using your bells. Last, a Saturator with Soft Clip switched on (watch at 7:30), which lets us bring the gain up without hard clipping.

8.Resample until you get a usable take

Because the unison phases change from note to note, the final step is to bounce the sound to audio many times and keep the copy that feels usable in your track.

Record the Vital track and its effects to an audio track, again and again (watch at 7:39), until you get a version you feel you can actually use. When one take sounds a lot like what we want but lacks a bit of low end, we add an EQ to bring the lows up (watch at 8:07). This process can take a while. It’s the same idea as in our foghorn bass in Vital guide: design the movement, then commit it to audio.

Bou is known for jump up and dancefloor drum and bass. If you’re writing in that style, our drum and bass subgenres guide explains where jump up sits, and our jump up tutorial shows how a bass like this fits into a full tune.

9.Turn the recreation into your own bass

You can always go back into Vital and change the waveforms. Adding a sine sub, a spectral warp mode and some FM turns the recreation into an original bass you can use.

The overtone in this patch is great, so to make a solid bass from it we turn on oscillator 3 with a sine from Basic Shapes for a sub (watch at 8:29), then bring the distortion a little lower and keep the sub’s level low. Then set oscillator 1’s spectral morph to Vocode and move it to change the formant (42% on screen). You can even FM it: turn on oscillator 2, bring its level down, and set oscillator 1 to FM OSC 2 (watch at 9:06). Finally, bring the unison voices down, to one on screen.

If you want another Vital bass built from the ground up, our bass like Mefjus in Vital takes an FM route instead of automation.

Common mistakes making a Breathe-style bass in Vital

• Starting with the sound instead of the movement. The pitch bend and the filter rhythm do most of the work. Set those up on a plain init saw first.
• Keeping the LFO synced. To automate the speed freely, turn the sync off and work in seconds.
• Too much resonance on the filter. We bring it all the way down and use the steeper 24 dB slope instead.
• Letting it go stereo. Stereo unison, detune and a wide chorus all spread the sound. For the recreation, keep them down.
• Distorting the whole spectrum. In the multiband stage, only the middle band is distorted. The lows and highs stay clean.
• Clipping the EQ. Bell boosts add level fast. Pull the output gain down and keep shaping.
• Judging one note. With phase randomisation on, every bounce is a little different. Resample several times and keep the best take.

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• Vital · Bass designHow to Make a Foghorn Bass in Vital6 min read · Video + guide
• Serum · Jump upHow to Make Jump Up Drum and Bass15 min read · Video + guide
• Vital · NeuroHow to Make a Bass Like Mefjus in Vital7 min read · Video + guide
• Vital · NeuroHow to Make Neuro Basses Like Noisia in Vital9 min read · Video + guide

FAQ: making a bass like Bou & Mark XTC’s “Breathe” in Vital

Next steps

Open Vital, load an init patch and set up the two movements first: the pitch bend and the LFO on a 24 dB filter, with its speed automated. Once the rhythm talks, add Saws for Days, mono unison, noise and the effects, then resample. For more bass types and when to use them, read our drum and bass bass guide; for more Vital sound design, try neuro basses like Noisia in Vital.

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