Hey guys I’m pretty new to synths and electronic stuff in general.Been working hard at it for a month now but there’s one core aspect of the sound I want that’s escaping me.It’s that slow attack wet/metallic warp bass sound common in UK underground techno (music for the mephedrone generation .Can anyone give me some idea of where to start?I’m assuming most of it is just playing around with modulation and filters but I just cant seem to hit it!A good example is 4 minutes into this monster - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tiVGQb_GFI
Any help would be much appreciated.I’m not looking to copy anyones sound but my god I love that noise.
Thats brilliant man thankyou.After Meef posted I had a play around and that’s exactly the way I did it.I think the problem I’m having is more to do with learning how to layer waves in the synth to get decent enough sub sound.That’ll keep me up all night anway. I love this forum
Edit: layering waves takes all the squelch out of it.Keep it simple stupid
Oooh good idea El.I’m in the habit of using a multitrack send to route anything below about 90hz to a send track but never thought to mess around with with the rest of the signal!Just out of interest, I’m keeping the original low end signal from the bass track and doubling it up on the send with a bit of compression.Is that the right way to go about it?or should i be muting the source to avoid the low end overpowering everything?
El°HYM,I had a quick play around this morning and ended up with something that’s on the right track.Didn’t see your example until just now so when i get a minute i’ll get the sine wave and some portamento macro in there for bassssssslide.The effects are on the instrumentDSP chain and the send tracks.Any comments on compression would be welcomed as it’s still something that I struggle with in practice.
While I’m here may I be cheeky and ask how to attach an xrns straight into a post?I bet it’s ridiculously simple but I gave up and set up a dropbox .Hopefully this link works
How have you managed to get a square wave sound so similliar to kinda sawwave influence? Well…your example sounds not as hollow as I’d expect from the base waveform.
I’ve listened to the original, hm, more “plasticness” -> try using subtle stereo chorus.
Also I think the original seem sampled (or interleaved) different stuff, with the same reso filter though. I think I can hear some kinda static fm type waveform with no low frequencies added the base pulse wave, giving grit & additional harmonics to the final wubs’ high ends, but not on every note. Also there seems to be sometimes more like sawwave charakter individual notes with same filter interleaved (if you know the classic saw 303 sound, you’ll notice them when looking for), and less bass freqs involved. I think there’s some sound level/energy distribution stuff involved following filter cutoff, taking away energy from low/mid freqs as the filter rises, focussing on the resonating part, making it more “targeted” at the cutoff and less massive/static - many ways to rome for this effect, parallel bandpass or whatever with medium/high width, eqing and compressing, whatever. All of this makes it more moving and refined than your example.
Methedrone must sincerly suck, for making you actually like having your neurons destroyed to such kind of music. bah.
What you really want is FM-synthesis, but since that won’t let itself be done in a sampler you just have to experiment with filters, distortion and different waveforms.
No, what I’ve meant to hear through, was just some added fm-style “static” waveform added to the pulse wave before the filter, maybe hipass filtered to not mess around with the bass and low mid freqs. You could try to just add some wavecycle of such a sound in the sampler, this additional harmonics source didn’t seem to mess with the pulse base sound, just enhance the reso filter noise. But the example tune interleaved different styles of that bass sound, sometimes pure pulse, sometimes with the fm grit, sometimes distorted, and sometimes it seemed to have sawwave influence instead of the hollow pulse sound.
.Can anyone give me some idea of where to start?I’m assuming most of it is just playing around with modulation and filters but I just cant seem to hit it!A good example is 4 minutes into this monster - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tiVGQb_GFI