Dubstepforum.com

Soundcloud
favorite new track, great balance of melody and dark thick basses.

those first bass sounds that come in are so warm and soft, and just seem so damm clean. anyone have any tips on how to get these sorta basses? there is some great reverb behind those basses, seems like maybe some room reverb and some plates... any other tips would be great

Glad your digging it. Couldn't tell you how the he made it though his sound design in his tunes is properly sick! Check his tune subways.! Amazing!

the track is so minimal but he manages to really get the most out of every sound that he places. im mostly interested in his workflow i guess, the way in which he first synthesizes the sounds and then the way he modulates them, etc. Bigups for putting out quality tunes Area Recordings

Damn that song is sick

He's on dsf, send him a link to this thread so he can post here if he wants.

stoked to see this thread, OP I'm honoured!

I'll need to have a dig through that project as I can't 100% remember how I produced the bass lol

The main sub though is definitely a blank EXS24 sine-sub patch dubbed the 'Cheeseblock' with a fair bit of extra harmonics added through drive/res.

will be back, watch this space

bigs ups man, great to hear from actual artists that i respect and admire ... i have been struggling myself to get those harmonic-rich subs and have been messing about with layering a second sine, one octave up to try and achieve these results. still sounding like strange though

i was mostly wondering about how you go about making your tracks and the sounds within them. do you mostly sample some bass-ish sounds and later throw them into the EX24 to automate them? I have been trying to get that more organic sound that you've been able to get and im realizing that the more i move away from massive (or any other soft synth for that matter), using a sampler with resampled audio loaded into it, the more original i can get sounds.

sorry that was kind of a ramble ...

i also just realized this soundcloud embed was the other song from the single and not the one that i originally though, but i equally enjoy both the tracks so its all good

sloth wrote:i also just realized this soundcloud embed was the other song from the single and not the one that i originally though, but i equally enjoy both the tracks so its all good

ah nah that's the release promo clip, so the 1st half of the track is "The Last Time..." and the 2nd half is "Voodoo Girl" they're spliced together.

sloth wrote:bigs ups man, great to hear from actual artists that i respect and admire ... i have been struggling myself to get those harmonic-rich subs and have been messing about with layering a second sine, one octave up to try and achieve these results. still sounding like strange though

With those type of subs I usually just use the one oscillator, and use Drive on the filter section and cutoff/resonance to create the harmonic 'warmth'. I have had good results layering in another sine an octave up like you say above, but usually one + tweaking in the filter section does the job. The sub in both these tunes is a variation on the same patch. It's a blank EXS24 sampler patch in Logic (single 'analog'-type sine wave). Bit of extra attack to remove click, little bit extra decay and release for girth and tail (fnar fnar). Small amount of filter drive (maybe about 5% tops) and small amount of resonance (about the same again) added. Then bring the filter down to about 18-20% to get rid of some of the added harmonics. Sometimes I add a bit of EQ on the channel but usually not if I can avoid it.

sloth wrote:i was mostly wondering about how you go about making your tracks and the sounds within them. do you mostly sample some bass-ish sounds and later throw them into the EX24 to automate them? I have been trying to get that more organic sound that you've been able to get and im realizing that the more i move away from massive (or any other soft synth for that matter), using a sampler with resampled audio loaded into it, the more original i can get sounds.

sorry that was kind of a ramble ...

Not a ramble at all, haha. Tbh it really varies depending on the vibe and complexity of the track. 99.99999% of my bass sounds are synthesized from scratch (using a range of software/hardware) and I resample them a lot. As you say, you can get more interesting variations through resampling. But my workflow changes depending on the arrangement and style of the bassline.

In a new tune I'm working on with Safire, I made a modulated wavetable mid on the ES2 as the 'core' midrange sound, then made a couple of stabs with it for the basis of the bassline arrangement. We bounced out those stabs, ran them through heaps of different processing chains in Guitar Rig, and bounced out the really interesting/good variations. Those were added to the bassline arrangement, either replacing existing stabs in places or layering underneath them.

Sometimes though, I'll leave a mid range stab in the synth for more control, but I'm trying to bounce as much stuff as I can these days to make things permanent (I have terrible OCD )

thanks for all the great knowledge. truly an inspiration. ill have to try giving the sub a bit of drive and then filtering out the top. ive tried getting all crazy with multiband saturation but im guessing that just un-necessary and way too far. i think ill keep working with mostly audio in samplers for my basses. i've already begun to get some very unique sounds that have tons of potential, but i just cant seem to turn them into actual baselines in a song... im sure it will begin to happen soon.

thanks again for taking the time to help me out