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Mr Carmack is stupidly good at doing this:
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But there isn't just one clear cut way of doing it.
I just use multiple different types of overdrive/distortion/drive/saturation all in series with tiny amounts of wet signal. maybe some slight eq at the end to get rid of some mud.
the good thing about doing this is every beat you make you'll most likely do it in a slightly different way, which makes your 808's versatile, and gives some extra flavour to your tunes.

any tips from anyone else?

Interested in this too, every time I do anything but saturate an 808 is turns into a big old donk

Yeah basically lots of saturation, small amounts of distortion and loads of overdrive... PSP Vintage Warmer can do some incredible things with 808's. If you work in FL then you coukld try normalising the 808 then bringing up the attack, creates a really fat pulsing 808 and makes room for another kick. Done it in the tune in my sig - the bass and quite a lot of the pads's are made from distorted/pitched 808's

Theres a video somewhere of youngstar making pulse x: worth a look.

edited

try automating the distortion so its not so hard when it hits.

also this processed 808 is achievable if you EQ, distort then EQ. tweak the EQ placed before the distortion for character.

another thing u can do is keep the clean 808 and send to another channel for distortion/compression/whatever.

lastly 1 thing that helps a lot is the song itself, if there's a whole bunch of things going on the 808 isn't going to have that same impact.

For 808 samples Trash 2 multiband dist works well
For synths try using the usual sine wave with pitch/amp envelope modulation but to make it cut through the mix you need to add harmonics. To do this you can use saturation again or add a sine wave an octave up or what i find sounds better it to use ring modulation. Have the sine wave ring modded by another sine wave which is an octave up from the fundamental . Use a frequency analyser whilst your doing it so you can see what your doing. As you add ring mod you'll see another band created this is what's gonna get it to pull through on a mix.
Hope this helps.

I tend to use the virus for this but it can be done with any synth with a ring mod. Here's some example patches for massive:
The basic patch is just a sine wave with env 1 on pitch and env 4 on amp with some slight feedback , mono voicing and make sure you have the trigger phase of the oscillator at 0 degrees.
Other patches are various ways to develop the sound from that including the ring mod i was on about ( make large increases in the amount in the mod osc section to hear how it affects the sound at first then back it off)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ls9asb

This is how I do it.

Load fxpansion tremor and make an 808 sounding kick drum.

Cross reference it with an instance of operator playing the root note I want to tune it to.

make 2 copies of the 808. drive the 2nd copy with saturation and distortion. band pass it with eq or a filter.

bounce both 808 samples to audio. bus them to a new channel with minimal compression to gel the levels back together.

bounce this to a new audio file.
drop it into a sampler. use filtering assigned to stuff like velocity/lfo/etc to get some movement with it. You can use a lowpass filter for example to retain balance between the low subby sound and the mid sample by simply using cutoff. Gives you a fair amount of control in terms of notes played. Not sure why, but resampling these types of sounds into a sampler instead of using the original synth just sounds better. Especially with lower notes. Synths just kinda tend to break up in the lower registers.

You can also use the start point of the sampler to have the kick snap on the axis of the sample that makes it pop. Something you can't do in a synth. It sounds great on 808 kicks. Hope this helps.

hutyluty wrote:Theres a video somewhere of youngstar making pulse x: worth a look.

Yeah, the rebirth distortion is pretty great at producing youngstar/dj mondie esque 808s.

I use that and a virus TI sample pack tbh. Probably a bit lazy of me but it's just means to an end.

wub wrote:

hutyluty wrote:Theres a video somewhere of youngstar making pulse x: worth a look.

Cheers for link. Found it very difficult to make out what he was doing when editing the 808; I see some sort of distortion effect being added, he extension of the release and the addition of a rapid decay pitch envelope thats about all i got from it.