hi there

im now 6 months into seriously makin tunes, and i feel im startin to get my head wrapped around it suffienctly in most aspects of it, my first musics, a piano concerto, is approaching completetion but there is just one thing which wrecks my head.

how do you make bollock achingly powerful bass witha soft synth? layering up 20-30 different basslines doesnt cut the cheese, it just sounds messy, no amount of playing around with eqing/compression seems to yeild substandard results, whats the trick? please divulge.

have you tried using samplers?

edit: they usually have some features that synths don't have, i don't know much about synths and samplers but i know that you can do stuff with samplers that you can't do with synths.

it's all about the original signal and EQ. You can make 2 simple ocilators BOOM with proper EQ.

soft synths can be pain in the ass for a bassline. use a hardware EQ, even if its just board eq, at some point in the signal chain. or run an out from yr comp into an amp then mic the amp. both will help build intensity and grit.

pirate arturia arp2600 vst

  we_kill_soapscum said:

soft synths can be pain in the ass for a bassline. use a hardware EQ, even if its just board eq, at some point in the signal chain. or run an out from yr comp into an amp then mic the amp. both will help build intensity and grit.

i like the idea of micing up my speakers, interestin. cheers.

and ive quit pirating!

Please provide an example of the bass you are attempting to acheive

eq and compression.

learn how to mix.

low pass filter, resonance way up high

  GORDO said:

low pass filter, resonance way up high

Works even better if you have the filter into self oscillation from all the resonance, then change the filter cutoff based on the keyboard pitch. A self oscillating filter will produce a very pure sine wave, and it will blow up your sub cockles.

This is only one very specific kind of bass tho, hence asking for an example.

fuck you crazy double posting board.

learn synthesis. simple things like having a sub-oscillator. rather than layering basslines, have a decent amount of oscillators in the patch, doing different things. pulsewidth modulation, detuning, saturation, etc. use more than 1 filter envelope, also doing different things (decay speed, resonance, etc..) ... unison, chorus, etc.. to widen in the highs of the bass can give a big feel... but it depends what kind of bass you want.

Start with just a pure sine wave and play it at a low note.

  analogue wings said:

Start with just a pure sine wave self-oscillating filter and play it at a low note.

ftfy

How do you play a self-oscillating filter?

I plug the pitch lead from my midi-cv module into the 1v/Oct jack on my filter, adjust the resonance to 10, then hook up the trigger output from the midi-cv module into the signal input of the filter. Usually just touching the jack is enough voltage to kick off self oscillation and I don't need to keep the trigger jack connected once its oscilating.

Lots of modern keyboards have the option to route keyboard pitch to filter cutoff, which is how you play a self oscillating filter. the cutoff frequency will then represent the note played.

oh ok, I thought you were talking about some lame vst version of self oscillation :)

i have a MAM warp 9 filter that you can "play" with MIDI notes

i have no idea what the later posts in this thread are talking about. but for now i am looking for a very pure, soft bass, bass you feel. so i am gonna play around with a low pass filter and play around with this. self oscillator?

The Nord Modular will blow up planets in self-oscillation. You can do plenty in software.

  pcock said:

i have no idea what the later posts in this thread are talking about. but for now i am looking for a very pure, soft bass, bass you feel. so i am gonna play around with a low pass filter and play around with this. self oscillator?

Self-oscillation is an unstable occurance in a resonant lowpass filter -- I suppose possible a resonant Highpass or Bandpass filter as well? I'm not sure because I've always done it with LPF's but anyway to keep it simple use a 24db lowpass filter.

The light bulb moment is usually when people realize that "resonance" is feedback. Very specific feedback, at the cutoff frequency of a filter. More feedback, more volume at that cutoff frequency. When you have enough feeback that the fed back feedback is feeding more feedback, you have self-oscilaltion, wherein a filter becomes a very loud pure sine wave oscillator.

Once this has occured it won't stop until you turn down the resonance. You can control it by changing the cutoff frequency, which will now change the "note" of your pure sine wave.

pcock,

How/where are you listening to the music you make? (headphones, speakers, type of room, acoustic treatments?)

I've been making music for quite some time and have used many different spaces to do so. Just recently, I've moved my studio to a room that swallows bass frequencies because of the space's dimensions and lack of proper acoustic treatments to the walls.

listening/mixing with some cheap monitors, an expensive hi-fi sub system, or rich sennheiser earphones in a little box room full of clutter.

i realise that bass sound waves are probably almost as long as my room at certain frequencies, unfortunately there isnt a great deal i can do with the room.

currently experimenting with low pass filters and micing my bass coming through the speakers/hifi, starting to sound a bit nicer fair does.

boosting 40-60hz (depending on the bass note played) with a mid to low q/bandwidth has been working well for me lately. that's being applied mostly to any bass or kick drums coming out of my Motif rack though, not a soft synth. not much exp with those on my part.

a favorite technique of some rappers I used to engineer was to make a sub-group of the original bass and some dupes (1-3) with lo pass filters intact to emphasize only the portion of the bass's desirable frequencies coming through the filters. due to phase from latency, this is not a tactic I would personally endorse but maybe it will help you get the sound you desire.

A low shelf filter might be better than a low pass. Try both.

i like the ms20 plugin in the korg legacy bundle

bRRRRRNNN