Andrew Apanov and Alex Mars from XSSR Academy wanted to do something special for Synthtopia readers, so they came up with this sound design tutorial on creating a ‘neuro bass’ in Ableton Live.
This aggressive bass sound would be right at home in a drum and bass or dubstep track. More importantly, though, the tutorial explores techniques that could be used as starting points for making original bass sounds.
Check it out and let them know what you think of the tutorial. If there’s something else you’d like to see Mars demonstrate, let them know!
This is actually pretty good, albeit you have to know a decent amount of back knowledge to understand everything he is doing, but that’s how I like my tutorials anyway. It’s always nice too when something can be done using a DAW’s default plugins.
this tutorial was good but only really worked for ableton for one reasonthe course tune in operators oscillators. i was able to make it on ableton very straight forward, but when i was watching this the first time i used Reason. everything in this tutorial would have worked if it weren’t for the very beginning. the occilators in reason dont course tune the harmonics directly, they by default track semitones which didnt allow me to phase the oscillators right. i will work on this tomorrow to see if i cant post a thor/combinator reason patch of this, but i have a feeling it is going to make me pull out the manuel to see what the other waves on the subtractor are.
if anyone has tried this on reason and knows better send me an email. 🙂
i find it very odd how the course tune effects those sin waves in operator, something seems different. maybe not
Darren, I may not be correct (because I don’t have Operator in Live 8 sans the suite package, and can’t go in to tool around) but I think he may be using the oscillators in an FM fashion. It would make sense that the course knob is adding those crazy metallic harmonics, especially because the course knob moves in even increments ie. he’s keeping the rate of modulation ratios close to whole numbers (he’s only adjusting the fine tune knob a bit, which would add some disharmonics, but just enough to give it that evil DnB feel).
I could be very wrong though.
The last wave he used was some sort of square, which is the defining underlying tone of a Reese bass.
-PL>Y
Operator is an FM synth (like NI FM8 or the various Yamaha DX-series hardware synths), and the way it’s used here is standard FM synthesis. Doing something like that in Reason is possible, although slightly awkward. See here: http://www.reason101.net/tag/fm-synthesis/
That’s true Daniel, but I do know that with Operator, you can stack the way the osillators interact with each other. Technically, you could use all 4 oscillators without having a single one being used for FM.
Surprisingly deep stuff. Daniel and presspl>y just fried my brain a bit, too. I have more to learn that I thought. : )
He’s using Operator in a stacked mode. The three top ones are feeding into the bottom oscillator. (3 modulators in series into an operator)
You can do that in Thor with the FM oscilators set up to feed in a series into the third oscillator… I think. And I think you’d have to put it in the modulation matrix of thor to be able to do that. Osc 1 into osc 2 into osc 3 I think, not sure exactly. Also FM8 or any other FM synth gives similar results.
When you get it remember to play around with it so you get your own sound and not just the same sound from the video.
Hope that helps. Cheers.