Haha so you want a second growl thread on how to make growls sound good?
Seriously though, I know what you mean. Just making a patch is 1/3 of the battle. I think you are approaching the top secret art of production and anyone worth while to share the skills prob wants to keep them secret.
Ascenic is kind of right but on the other hand, getting a fat sound starts in your patch (that sounds so dirty) or sample. He is right though because mixing and mastering correctly is the other 2/3 of it.
I am getting into sound design pretty heavily these days and doing a lot of A/B comparisons with pro sounds to see what it takes to get certain sounds nice and full. I am finding that a lot of the time my patches don't have the harmonic content to make them FAT. What I have found is that if I can't get the fatness that I want by post processing, I just need a better patch or another layered sound. I try to add missing harmonic content by either bringing in another oscillator / operator in the range I need or just layering in another patch to fill in thin areas. I think this is where FM8 shines...it is really easy to add pinpoint harmonic content if you know what you are missing. For Massive, I try to utilize all 3 Oscilators and I think of OSC1 as the main sound and then OSC2-3 as layers to enhance the sound.
So this is prob the most pro sounding thing that I have ever made. I just sat in my DAW and did an A/B with the Spag Heddy, Eh!de Better track and tried to roughly reproduce the drop intensity and fatness...no necessarily remake the sounds. The first sound amazingly has NO post FX per se, it is just a single Massive patch that is routed into my bass group which has general mixing / mastering sort of processing. In massive, I used all 3 oscilators like I described above. OSC 2 and 3 are just fattening the sound.
Soundcloud
In a VST you want to utilize unison. I found this helps a ton with huge bass sounds. So in FM8, I like to slide the detune up to ~30-40% and then slide the pan up to 30-40% as well and have at least 2 voices. In Serum you just pop the voices up to 2 and then take the detune knob all of the way down. In Massive it is kind of tricky because restart via gate takes unison away. You have to leave it disabled, flip the voices to at least 2, and pan maybe 20-30%. I set most of my patches up this way and they get really nice stereo width and sound fatter. You don't necessarily want to do this with everything but big fat bass sounds turn out pretty nice this way. These are the only VSTs I use at the moment but once you play around with it, you can figure it out in what ever VST you have.
So for processing, you want to add FX that make sounds bigger like compression, saturation, distortion, and dimension FX. Soft clipping is kind of a limiter substitute (how I use it anyway). It won't make your sound fatter, it just lets you make it louder while capping the db. So if you soft clip, you prob want to use it later in your processing as you would a limiter. I used soft clipping to make my snare in the track in my signature but I actually don't use it that much in the rest of the mix. I think it comes in handy for loudness but make note, it doesn't harmonically fatten a sound.
