Basses That Sound Very "In Key"

[Actium]

I got a good knowledge on designing basses by watching SeamlessR, however seamless approaches basses without a whole lot of melodic idea in mind. I'd like some input on how to make basses where one could play melodies but still get a "dubstepyy" feeling. I'd love any tips!


Example: You can clearly hear theres a simple hook melody

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjY5Z3OazMI

[RADD]

Play the melody using a simple tone and replace them later with your transformer wub wobs in the same key?

[_Agu_]

Complex sounds made using fm synthesis (growls etc.) don't usually work well for anything else than for playing the note it was designed for. This can be sometimes avoided via resampling or making multiple copies of the same patch and tweaking the settings so that each patch works well for one note.

Relatively simple sounds like leads and sub bass (lowest frequencies define the overall pitch of the song btw) usually work well for playing different notes.

Also modulating things like wavetable position or filter cutoff freq can sometimes create melodic feeling because they change the tonal color of the sound. It's pretty hard to explain really, especially since i don't know much about music theory.

What i've noticed that many well known artist do is that they have completely different sound for playing each part of the melody. Here's an example:



Notice how when the drop hits there's one growl at the first kick, then that weird higher pitched sound on the first snare hit, different growl at the second kick and slightly higher pitched reese/growl at the second snare hit. After that the first growl again which leads to layered high pitch synth playing few different notes. All growls are just playing one note when the lead plays 3 notes. I saw some datsik interview maybe 2 years back where he talks about how some artists like flux pavilion makes mostly simple sounds but great melodies and some others like datsik himself make big robotic basses, but don't know much about making melodies with them, then there's guys like Skrillex who can combine them both. Maybe this is just a lot of bullshit, and idk anything, too much writing i'm going to sleep, peace.