Need help with designing a meaty reece bass

Quotec

Active Member
Joined
Jun 30, 2013
Wasup guys

Lately I have heard a track with superb lowpassed reece bass that I can´t get enough and was wondering how it is designed. I tried the classical way by detuning 2 saw waves(+ sine wave for sub freqs), applying some distortion and chorus but my reeces so far are not that "woofy" and "meaty" as in the example track below(btw brilliant remix). I don´t know if the problem is in the processing(i.e lowpassing too much or too less, applying wrong amounts of distortion, missing out critical processing link(maybe processing chain itself is important) etc.) or in the waveform itself. I mean I have tried designing different "reece" basses with combinations of saw, square, sine, triangle, PWM and whatsoever. In theory meaty sounds should come from sine/triangle waveforms but when I used these in designing process then after applying some bit of distortion the resonance hits the roof and bass sounds very nasty in a bad way. So waveform combinations that include sine usually sound bad for me. What´s the trick here? How to get that woofy and meaty reece? Btw I also like reece bass in "Painted Smile" by Commix.

 
I like this sound too so I thought I'd give making it a go. I came up with this: https://soundcloud.com/phoreeses/smooth-bass/s-5WCl9. Not as good as in the song, but it's a start. Not sure if you already got yours to that point, but if not here's what I did. I used massive with two oscillators. The first was a smooth square played down in the sub region. The second was a sine wave set an octave up from the square, and only at 75% volume. I put the unisono up to 8 voices and added a tiny bit of detuning, only 0.02. I set the low pass filter in massive to about half. Finally I EQ'd out the sub and added a second track that just played a sine wave so there is no phasing down there.
 
Thanks mate for your efforts! Frankly, your version of bass is not that powerful, but certainly it would do it´s proper job in a track(after lots of filtering and modulation). Yeah I´ve been trying different things to get this kind of bass and I think I managed to sort of create what I wanted. It´s simply 2 detuned saws with sub layer, heavily distorted and filtered to squeeze it in that very low place where it produces lot of meat. The problem with my basses tho is that they tend to sound too nasty in 120-180Hz area and I know it´s because sub layer fucks it up after being distorted. So I replaced it with square and I think it sound fairly decent now.

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So there´s my version. I think it needs much more work to get the right balance(+ I was lazy to scoop EQ and do proper compression, that´s why it sounds clicky when it hits higher).


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Also whacking a some bit of chorus will help to get bigger sound.
 
Sweat. I struggle with getting beefiness (is that a word?) into bass. I think the reason is because I hate when tracks sound muddy, so I always end up taking away more lower mid then I probably should. I just added a bit of chorus to mine and it came to life a bit more, cheers. I think I need to add a tiny bit of distortion to get some grit too. Like really subtle.

Anyway, one thing i noticed when I looked at the track through a spectral analyser is that the second harmonic of the sub note is really prominent. In most tracks I look at it isn't, so it struck me as odd. When I played around I found this to be pretty important to the sound. For your bass maybe blending in a sine wave an octave up from the sub note will push it closer to the sound of the bass in the track. Let me know how that goes if you try it.
 
Haha nice mate, I do a lot of spectrum analyzing myself too. :D And this track was no exception. I noticed the sub thingy but I haven´t yet put that into practice. One very very important thing about basses is to choose right key, I think you probably know that. F-A works very well for drum&bass, the rest is questionable. And that fucking sucks, it limits my creativity so much. I really like D and D# for my basses, sometimes I can get away with it but these are definitely not as powerful as the one´s mentioned above. So I cheated a lil bit and made a mid bass in D or D# but underneath I still played a sub in E-F#, lol not sure if this out-of-keyness is noticeable but it definitely helped to expand my possibilities.

Btw, do you know of any brilliant sub bass vst? I saw Break was using Trillian but damn it´s so huge and I can´t seem to rip it properly(forgive me god for being such an asshole). Any more recommendations? I liked how Mind Vortex in their masterclass pitch bended all the basses and how they made a huuuuuuge sub bass, I want to try do the same but FL Studio sucks balls when it comes to automating shit.
 
If it sounds good it's allowed, haha. Actually that's part of my issue with production, I struggle to break "rules" when mixing. I wouldn't do this with bass notes, but speaking of Mind Vortex I think I remember them saying that there is a supporting bass sound that plays the third and the fifth relative to root note in Hot Box. In saying that, their main bass sound and sub bass are the same note. That was a really great masterclass actually.

I don't know about sub bass synths. I always roll off the bottom of the main bass sound and use a separate channel playing a sine wave for the sub, seems to be a pretty common way to do it.

Out of interest why do you like D, D#? Is it possibly your room acoustics making those notes seem better? I know in my room A always booms, but it's just room acoustics. I need bass traps. That F-A thing can be annoying, it seems really important for hard hitting dnb. I think you can get away with keys where the bass is higher in the more liquid stuff.
 
Yeah I agree mate, Mind Vortex´s masterclass is probably the best out there. I really admire their production, imo they have the tightest shit in the dnb scene right now. Speaking about note preferences, well D and D# just sound quite low and so they are helpful for darker stuff imo. But the biggest problem with these notes is that most of the time hitting this low ruins the sound too drastically, also after long practice of using D and D# I have discovered that mid and high-end response from these is shallower which is a problem on it´s own(how bass stands out in the mix etc.) I guess I should experiment more with layering.

Lol, I need to think about my room acoustics as well haha. But recently I have gotten more into mixing with headphones so that I can hear every detail very clearly and use speakers just to check how low-end works. Most of the time I can get a nice sounding piece on speakers but when I check it on headphones all those little clicks, distortion and balance issues flare up. So getting a crystal-clear production in headphones guarantees it will translate very well into speakers too.
 
I add a touch of overdrive to my sub. However, it can also boost unwanted frequencies, do I use a linear phase EQ and remove pretty much everything below 30hz
 
Mitliband compression, use it a lot. Smash the shit out of the lows initially. Then split the bands, sub and tops. Mono the sub at 70-100hz. Now use all the distortion and chorus effects you want on the tops. Followed by more multi band compression afterwards and an eq. Balance the sub with the tops using several different sound systems.
 
I found i can get a really dirty/clean-if-i-want-it bass by using the groan 1 and lunacy waves in massive, modulating the phase and position of luna, detuneing it down one octave, and putting it through a double notch and a scream filter, modding the cutoff of those, then putting that through trash 2 and fucking it up a bit (im new here are we allowed to swear?) and then you can play around with it, i suggest mabye swapping the lunacy for a scrapyard or AI wave, stop me if im boring you, or if this didn't help at all
 
+1 on Trash2. I like to set this up on a send though, and try to make the original bass sound as big as possible, then work on the balance of the send, usually I will have 2, one with a less crazy distortion on it, for the lower end of the spectrum bass sounds, and one for the Mid to highs, where it might be complete mayhem going on in Trash. The thing that gets me making better sounds though in Trash is the Convolution module, with a bit of experimentation, you can get all manner of possibilities for the designing of your bass.
All the stuff I have been doing lately is born from making as good as a sound as I can in the bass channels first, then I start sending those signals out to the trash, and its loads of time spent messing around with them.
On that harmonci thingy, there is a video of Quadrant in one of the loopmasters/pluginboutique vids for some synth, where he talks about the 3rd(? maybe 2nd???) Harmonic, and how any processing seems to really grab onto that harmonic. There was a massive difference when he A/B'd it in the video.
 
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