Hashbass Is a ‘Workaholic’ Who Wants to Make Worlds Collide With His Music

At some point in the last few years, Hashbass aka Harshit Misra was everywhere. A session bass guitarist for several years in New Delhi, Hashbass became more than just a bassist for hire when he began performing live with the likes of Sid Sriram, Prateek Kuhad, Divine, and more, all before the pandemic.  

After that, he’s gradually chosen quality over quantity and, more importantly, stepped into a producer role like never before. The biggest culmination of that occurred in January 2023 when he brought his collab-heavy live set House Of Hashbass to the debut edition of Lollapalooza India in Mumbai, and more recently on Apr. 3, 2025 when his new tape House Of Hashbass, Vol. 1 dropped 11 tracks.  

Gestation period: While the Lollapalooza India set brought in everyone from Hanumankind to Burrah, Kayan, Rashmeet Kaur and more, the material for House Of Hashbass, Vol. 1’was first conceptualized soon after the performance. While the producer-bassist already had a few releases out by then, he looks back at the last two years as a time of understanding and moving forward with his identity beyond just being known as a bass player. “Bass is my voice in general, so I don’t need to advertise it anymore. But I had to find myself so many times in the process of trying to understand what to do, if I had to do it [make music] my own way.”  

Mastering the mix: His new mixtape is a genre-defying journey, featuring everyone from Punjabi pop artists Rashmeet Kaur and Raaginder, to rappers like Yungsta, The Siege and Saniya MQ, singer-songwriter Pho, Tamil rapper Rak and more. It’s safe to say it’s a diverse offering that swings from melodic rap to folk to grooves that get under your skin. Making it meant Hashbass acknowledging that he wears different hats, but needs to focus on which ones to wear most often. “I don’t want to be the jack of all trades, master of none. I realized, as time passes, that I need to focus. I’ve been doing this for a very long time and need to know where to navigate,” he adds.  

Brain feed: The way Hashbass sees it, being a producer who works with a whole variety of artists is a lot like being a psychologist. “[You have] to understand what the scenario is and you try to understand what the artist is [about]. The most scary and most interesting thing is if you’ve not met an artist, you have a preconceived notion about them, until the day you meet them and that changes,” he says.  

The shape-shifter: In addition to being a psychologist, Hashbass takes the metaphors further and says he has to be a chameleon-like musician. You also have to “be like water,” Hashbass adds, a nod to the famous quote by Bruce Lee.  

The bassist-producer says, “I would say you need to read the room.” Thankfully for him, the motive for everyone in the room is always music, as obvious as that sounds. “As clichéd as anybody might take it, it’s [about] the music, and the emotion behind it. That’s very important for me,” he adds.  

Rooted in discipline and self-respect: Hashbass has been in the room and on the road with a lot of musicians in the last decade, most recently touring the U.S. with singer-songwriter and music supervisor Ankur Tewari. Among the core principles that Hashbass emphasizes repeatedly are discipline and self-respect. He says, “Also to give respect to the other person’s art. In the first half hour or something, I show the artist that I’m here. ‘You are here in my world, and I’m also colliding with your world. Let’s try and see where we can land.’” 

He recalls working with young rapper Saniya MQ on “Majra” from House of Hashbass, Vol. 1 and their previous collaborative album, Baccha Kisko Bol Raha Hai. “She’s so focused, driven with her music that I sometimes feel you can’t possibly make a joke when you’re working together. I’m not saying that she’s completely serious, but I really love the part where she’s very serious from the moment the music starts,” he recalls.  

Groove and grind: Shuttling between Mumbai, Bengaluru and New Delhi, Hashbass manages family, beats and bass duties. “One side is the rock star life, the second is a lot of responsibilities. You learn it at some point in time,” he says with a laugh. Between studio time and stage time, he’s slowly begun to prefer writing music now. “If it [playing live] had to be taken out, it won’t be such a problem,” he muses. He doesn’t have a concept about work-life balance, though. “It’s all work for me, I’m a workaholic,” he says. It led him back to his alma mater, Musicians Institute in Los Angeles, where he led a masterclass called Groove and Grind: Music Business with Hashbass. “That was something very nostalgic, it felt like full circle,” he says.  

The future of music: Hashbass sees the looming AI perspective as something that’s helping hip-hop in terms of sampling and resampling. “You can take your idea and it resamples it and gives you endless possibilities,” he says. He’s all about adapting now, and believes future musicians will need to do the same. “It’s scary. It’s also limitless, and [the] more quickly we adapt to something, the more we’ll be able to sail through.”