Dubstepforum.com

Im making a tune that has a big dub feel in it and im having trouble with the bass. It's has a dual oscilator on it right now with a daft filter, no lfo (making a bass not wobble), and im having trouble making it accent on the hit on my 8th notes. An example of what im trying to achieve is when a bassist plucks his strings he gets that accent when he finger plucks it. I was wondering if anyone knew how to do that in massive. If anything is unclear just please ask and ill try to give more info. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you for reading this and have a nice day.

You can modulate the amp values or even the filter a bit with the performer.

a good way to synth a plucked bass tone is using subtle envelopes on the filter and amp(s) ... you want zero attack and a mid-quick decay so the parameters fall slightly after the initial onset of the note.

amp envelope: fast (or 0) attack, put the sustain to 0 and then adjust the decay till you get the plucks. Increase the sustain afterwards to taste.

you may module your filter with the same env for more effect.

e-motion wrote:amp envelope: fast (or 0) attack, put the sustain to 0 and then adjust the decay till you get the plucks. Increase the sustain afterwards to taste.

you may module your filter with the same env for more effect.

^This, & play around a lot with different env settings. I find most of the good sounds I create in Massive come from nice env application.

Im not on my studio PC atm, but I have got an ok dub bass out of Massive. Theres a wavetable called something like B-Pluse, and it a wavetable of a bass guitar. Put an env on the WT pos, with no attack and quickish decay, going the direction that it becomes softer. Then set the amp env with a longer decay than the WT pos env. Turn the intensity down, or use a LP filter (no res) to roll off some of the highs, and then use a little of one of the tube distortions to get some grit/warmth. Also set the velocity to control the osc amp, or/and filter cutoff so you can do accents.

But imo if you want that real dub bass, you got to go about doing it as closely to how they did it as you can, with a bass guitar (with right set-up/amp/playing style ect), or if you can't do that, use the best samples you can get like that.

Edit: Also nice to see a few threads on here recently, with people talking about actual DUB sounds

Nice pick on the B-Pulse, I was using a Saw wave with no wavetable modulation. Sounds better now

How about actually playing a bass? I mean, sampling a bass and putting it across the piano roll. I do that on my dubs and works just fine, just mess with velocity. Also komplete elements has a nice bass library for kontakt, really realistic. Or are you looking for that synth feel?