Bass processing question

[Sliverdub]

Sorry if this has been asked before but my problem is adding effects.

Bare with me tho guys I haven't been actually producing for that long. It seems every time I add effects regardless of what I use it seems to take away from the sound not add to it and splitting is even worse so for the sake of the question don't worry about the splitting right now cos I'm noob but my main concern is just effects in general.

This is what I find, chorus thins my sound do does phaser and flange. Distortion seems to add a mid quality that is not nice. Reverb is ok

Sausage works but sounds again not the clean but big sound you hear on all the brostep and dubstep tracks. Take dodge and fusky for example. Big sound, I know they layer but it seems like these producers all have some kind of "clean" distortion. I can't figure it out.

Where an I going wrong? This is driving me mad, please don't think I haven't experimented before asking I'm just really stuck. It's like my sounds are thin and noisy every time I try to make them "fat"

[mthrfnk]

Try frequency splitting and like you said layering. Then process everything independently, and glue it all back together in a buss with a good compressor.

[Eat Bass]

^ that works but as the OP said sometimes i tend to make the sound even worse than before splitting.

sometimes less is more...

but back to the OP, i have similar problems. but i have found that adding only a tiny bit of a few different effects. also, add multiple instances of the same effect but have each effecting the sound only a tiny bit. make sure you use an eq to remove any new unwanted frequencies from effecting. lastly, effect in parallel. meaning mix a completely dry (original) signal with one or multiple effected signals. that way you still get the cleanness of the original sound but you get the flavor from the effected signal and can mix it in to taste.

[6ense_muzik]

Try using a multiband distortion plugin such as iZotope Trash, Ohmicide or Fabfilter Saturn.
Also try to make your sound as "fat" as possible before it leaves the synth.
Camelphat has some nice sounds as well

[Sliverdub]

Wow thanks that's a bunch of stuff I can try, mabey I've been expecting too much from just a few plugs. Will certainly get on this. Re splitting I think maybe I should learn to get sounds sounding good on their own to begin with. It's a shame not all plugins had some sort of bandpass where you can select which bit gets effected instead of splitting them I find more problems with the actual split than anything and then it's just down hill from there on lol

[6ense_muzik]

multiband distortion is nice to split the effected frequencies.
But yeah, make the synth sound big first. You can't polish a turd as they say

[JTreeZY]

Subtractive EQing