distortion

[tarranjoe]

ive recently started to make some jump up (i mainly make liquid) and i think distortion is a fairly key part to the bass sounds, however i always seem to end up with it sounding rough and dirty, not in a good way, lol. how do you combat this? any tips would be appreciated.
cheers

[Nutek]

just keep tweaking mate, tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak until you find the right sound for you, what prog are you using? try changing the level of the distortion down a bit.

[Sammy Dexcell]

try puttin shit loads of distortion on then a filter envelope after the distortion. be sure to seperate the low end so u dont loose the bass

[tarranjoe]

thanks for the tips guys. @ forensic, im using logic 8, all my sounds are made in massive and im just using the inbuilt logic plug-ins

[Marc:L]

Uhm how do you seperate the low end of the bass? I know that Shimon is using a standard plug-in from logic,but i don't know wich one.....

[Nutek]

dont know anything about logic, sorry mate :(

[tarranjoe]

Uhm how do you seperate the low end of the bass? I know that Shimon is using a standard plug-in from logic,but i don't know wich one.....

just copy the track, and put a channel EQ on both tracks, cut off everything above 80hz on one track, or wherever it sounds good, and cut off everything below 80hz on the second track. now one is the sub and the other the mid/hi

[sook]

steinbergs overdrive is so good....
i use it over all the other software distortion plugs ive tried....

[Infex]

Tube distortion or saturation may give you the sound your looking for.

[Ketz]

yea defo agree with Sphinx - put distortion on (tube / tape whatever just play around) on a basic single sine wav (turned a few octaves down), and make sure u compress (i'm sure u do anyways lol) the distortion will give u a lot more warmth and texture to the sound, cut the frequency and u lose a lot of the "fuzz" but u can still keep some of that warmth from the distortion if u tweak it just right

hope that was of some help! :D

[dj_billz]

A touch of distortion is nice once you've created a patch but you'll probably find a lot of the twisted/distorted sounds you hear in drum and bass are probably created by the initial waveforms. Try using some nice detuned squarewaves/sawtooths combined with an lfo on the cutoff of a filter over it all.

[standard_proc]

yeah i agree, try and make your original sound as gritty and distored as possible. then add a touch of compression and a dash of distorion to taste

[moriaty]

an important thing imo, is resampling. is better to add a little bit of distortion, then bounce to audio, and repeat. Best to play it through a sampler, and experiment with different pitch modulations.(but thats moving away from the topic...)
point is that one instance of heavy distortion will rarely bring a nice effect. try adding a little from a lot of sources rather than a big pile of salt and pepper.!