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Hi, I have been around this forum for a moment, and I want to bring something that is clearly missing.

There is planty of thread about growls, bass, leads and drums, but none about how to make them really cool.

Like, why isn't it any thread about clipping ? Dynamic range ? Everything is about "How do you make this growl ?" and for my knowledge and more amateur than me, I would like to bring the real hard stuff in the spotlight !

I want to know, is anibody would like to discuss about soft clipping ? compression ? dynamic range ? how to make a song really sound like Excision or every big names, but not speaking about there sound design, but "How do they do to make their sound so powerful". I think it is the main question. You don't have to make the next generation growl to be successful, if you have the best growl ever but no skill to make him sound well it is nothing more than a waste.

So, let's speak about it ! What is for you the moste important things to learn to be able to bring Excision and Culprate back to their mommy ?!

well in my opoinion there isn't anything to say about this, "soft clipping, compression, dynamic range" are a part of the basic stuff you must know before starting producing a track. And there's no magic formula do not forget you are still tanlking about music, it's art, that's what makes big names sound how they actually sound. But anyway I may be wrong.

This is the Sound Design portion of the production forum. You don't come to the part specifically made for talking about dank wobs m808 to ask about compression. There's hundreds of places over the net for that, but relatively few for dank wobs m808.

In technical terms, I don't know shit about shit when it comes to music. I just know what sounds good to me, and I try to make it as listenable as possible.

Ascenic wrote:This is the Sound Design portion of the production forum. You don't come to the part specifically made for talking about dank wobs m808 to ask about compression. There's hundreds of places over the net for that, but relatively few for dank wobs m808.

A lot of place for sure, but when it come to dubstep and you have the chance to get the better forum with some of the most talented producers you can have all the better advices

The fact that people only focus on "how to make this sound" and forget the "how to make this sound good" restrain their music. listen to EDM, only 3 sounds : a kick, a hat and a giant pluck, but give the good sample to someone, he will be able to make the composition, but without knowledge on the compression / clipping / mastering it only will be elevetor music.

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.



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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.

Just use OTT compresion and phasers, and you can make all the sweet growls like me; Soundcloud