Big, Engulfing, Bass tips

Did found this interesting tips from a guy, while surfing here'n there on other dnb forums... Sounds excellent for a start, I really loved.
So I decided to steal it and reposte it in here.

Basic Tips on making a Twisted Neurofunk Bassline
« on: Nov 03, 2008, 17:14 »

Neurofunk is the much sought after sound by many DnB producers, some see it as the "holy grail" of sub genres (myself included!). After hours of experimenting I have found some tips that will hopefully be of help to some of you :bigup:

Please don't think of this as the "be all and end all" - far from it, in fact these types of basses are all derived from a lot of self experimentation (that doen't include touching one's self lol!) with enough perseverence I'm sure you will all find some gems :D So that said these are some techniques that helped me get closer to that desired twsited sound.

Start off with a reece sample (again refer to the synthesis threads of how to creat your reece, detuned saw wave - split into low / mid / hi etc) it is really important that you start of with a really chunky sound with lots of harmonics as the more you process (esp with filters etc) you lost some of the sound so the initial sample needs to be as phat as possible.

Now you want to start experimenting with playing some long stretched notes and some short stabs, anything goes, have your sequence anywhere from 1 bar to 8 bars long (more would prob end up being too complicated 8 is pushing it, i tend to go 1 - 4 bars). play one note, play a meldoy, make loads of variations (I find keeping your first 1st level of processing as described below and then re-processing that in several different combinations can help you create some nice variations to the sound)

My 1st level of processing will be to run an LFO filter set to band pass with the lfo sync'd and lfo rate / amount adjusted to create a nice wobble. Export this sequence as a wav and reimport into ur sampler.

Next ensure the "bounced" sample is played at note C3 and streched (so all ur doing is playing the initial sound that you made at the right note with the correct lfo rate, playing the sample at another note will mess things up as it will play at a different pitch and cause it to be out of sync with ur tempo)

Run a simple notch filter thorugh this sample (automate to taste, one sweep, 2 anything depending on what kinda movement ur after) u shoud start getting some nice "morph" sounds at certain points during the sweep, play around as you will find certain "sweet spots" that will make your reece start to sound nasty

Export this sequence a 2nd time and reimport again into a sampler, again play on note C3 now start playing with your pitch bend wheel on the sampler, i noticed if u try to match the pitch bend to the "sweet spot" of ur notch filter sweep, the "morph" gets even more pronounced, its funny i really underestimated the importance of the pitch bend on making a neuro bass, as in effect ur bending the sound, ur naturally getting so much more movement in the re(esp wen u combine it with the other levels of processing). so ya ur naturally twisting the sound by bending it doh! :clap:

Now add some phase, mess around with your octaves (i found some pleaseant or should i say nasty surprises by simply lowering the pitch of these babies a whole octacve, even making ur initial sample with a very fast lfo rate and then pitching the whole sequence down an octave can make it sound daaaaaaarrk)

Now this may seem like a lot of waffle for you guys, i haven't perfected this technique but i made some bass sounds on Saturday that were the closest I have ever gotten to this sound

The main points to take if u are taking onboard comments from my technique are:

re-sample, re-sample, re-sample! each time processing your sound differently to create more movement
understand the importance of the pitch bend - it was staring me int he face the whole time, its pretty damn important imo
all ur mwawawa will come mainly from lfo filters (lol)
all the subtle morphing sounds can be acheived thru notch filter automation
personally BP lfo filter followed by notch filter automation has worked really well for me so far
feel free to take the same sample and high pass it and layer it onto the original sample to make the sound bigger and more textured
if ur losing "heaviness" of ur sound after each level of processing, don't be afraid to use compression / normalize / maximize whatever to re-beef ur sound, at the end of the day ur main neuro bass will sit on the mids and you will have a clean sine sub sitting underneath it to make the whole thing full n phat anyhow :D

peace bitches :lol:

edit - i didn't specify what waveforms my lfos are set in - tbh i did say its all about experimentation heheh and the truth is - I can't remember as i'm at work and have no rns files to refer back to! oh well :shakeshark:
Click to expand...
 
Thought I'd share how I go about and make basses big. Heres an example of a recent bassline I made:

https://soundcloud.com/cloudburstmusic%2Fbass-demonstration%2Fs-UtzlH

The bass is made in massive then resampled (and a pure sine-sub underneath obviously). For this one its a 1 saw and 2 squares, one of them is an octave lower all of them are slightly detuned by different amounts. I use a bandpass filter and the double notch inside massive to focus the tone on the lower mids. For effects I use minimal distortion and the dimension expander for just some width (I don't overdo it). Then I use a sine shaper to get the sound to feel more "tight" (I don't really know what it does to the sound to be honest but that what it makes it sound like).

For the modulation I put lfo's on the cutoff of the notch and bp-filters witch moves slowly in a tiny tiny range just to get it to sound more "alive". Then I put a macro on the bandwidth and resonance of the BP-filter and the drive of the sine-shaper to use for some more evil and more drastic modulation.

After I drawn in the modulation from the macro I bounce my bass-riff out to audio. Here I get more funky with the distortion... I probably have around 10 distortion II-plugins witch does different stuff (logic plugin), very little distortion from each plugin. A bit crusher with 24 bits and 2xdownsampling for some crust. I also compressed it by a bit then I bounced it out again.

Now is the part when I make a new channel and make another copy of my audio clip. Lowpass one channel by the 1k mark and high pass the other on at the same location with a 6 db slope. If u use 12 db or higher I think it makes it sound like 2 different sounds rather than one and thats not what I'm looking for.

I whack a chorus with rather low wet for some width and a compressor on the highs with quite high ratio to really squeeze it. And for the mids and bass I use logics sample delay with really low amount of modulation (55ms left and 77ms right). This makes the sound really wide.

Thats about it I think... Hope I inspired someone or made someone aware of some new techniques. :)
 
Last edited:
logikz said:
thats a nice bit of info there jimpa, good work. cant say i dig the bass very much, but the method is sound.
Click to expand...


I kinda agree. The bass doesnt have that big morphing sound we're all after in this thread, but as Karl said, the method is very good, and extremely useful. I can actually imagine that bass being something similar to a Danny Byrd type track, or anyone else from Hospital Records for that matter! So thats not a bad thing at all!
 
I gotta have a prop listen at home, but sounds already cool!
Any chance to drop me the project or stems for a remix?
 
Yeah, Ableton 8.
I don't own a Predator, but I'm sure u can pm me a way to find it... ;)

You can actually bounce the track of the predator
 
Last edited:
My thoughts: I'm still so noob but bass sounds is my favourite bit so..

As far as resampling goes, I always think of it as trying to get away from the 'synth driven' sound rather than just applying extra processing to the synthy sound if that makes sense. Of course sometimes you're good to go straight out of the synth, but for those call and response stabs chopping up longer samples and rearranging bits of audio is where I start.

Get to know at least one synth inside out.

Make loads of bass sounds during pre-production. For me trying to make a sound from absolute scratch when I'm sequencing a tune kills the vibe.

These bass sounds don't have to sound anything like a bassline! Just get a full range of frequencies, movement, pitch bend, long and short notes, whatever.

Add an fx chain while you're doing this if you want and enhance the sound, but export a sample at each stage cos it can be damn hard to reverse engineer an hour of tweaking if it starts getting shite.

Keep the sub in! It's easy enough to filter out later if you want to, but if you do heaps of chopping and slicing (especially pitch bend phrases) it can be hard to match it with a sine sub later on.

When you're looking for interesting bits to resample, the bits where the sample bends, where the filters interact in a way you didn't expect, in between short notes, at the start and end of notes, all these are good places to look.

Formant filter with a really low wet ratio can add interest in the mids

Here's a bass sound I made today in Albino, pretty crappy
https://soundcloud.com/subprime%2Fbass-1

chopped up and sequenced with a couple of other bits from my bass sample folder it sounds like this. Most of the stabby sounds I use will be snippets of longer stems like the one above, cut out and processed.
https://soundcloud.com/subprime%2Fresample-1

So 99% of every bass or midrange sound I use comes from a blank (initialised) Albino 3, but it doesn't all happen at once, I might have made the original stem a year ago.

Also, export every resample you make, you can resample it again another time, happy days.

Um...distortion is everything, but not as in grab a 'distortion' plug and turn it to 11. Tape saturation, overdrive, analogue modelled fx that saturate or clip the sound, eq's and compressors that aren't transparent, all these can add to the sounds harmonics and tone.

This was going to be my example but it got way past the stage of being able to show how it was done. All done the same way as the clip above.

https://soundcloud.com/subprime%2Fwatershed

As I said, I don't know very much at all but every amateur knows a couple of gems and between us all we'd make a pro.

Great thread
 
Last edited:
Mr Fletch said:
Here's my latest piece, that uses alot of technique's learnt from this thread. I posted it in the new talent section, but I figured seeing as this thread was a huge influence to me, I'd share it here too.

https://soundcloud.com/mr-fletch%2Fkronix-chaos-theory
Click to expand...



Bit late to the party with this thread, but very interesting reading. Obviously as you've said, Mr Fletch, that particular clip was produced using various techniques detailed previously, but would you mind breaking down exactly how you managed this particular bass/modulation, please?

Cheers and nice work guys!
 
zyence said:
Bit late to the party with this thread, but very interesting reading. Obviously as you've said, Mr Fletch, that particular clip was produced using various techniques detailed previously, but would you mind breaking down exactly how you managed this particular bass/modulation, please?

Cheers and nice work guys!
Click to expand...

Honestly, if I could remember, I'd tell ya lol!

Basically I started with a simple reece bass in a synth (3 saw waves, 1 detuned up by 6 cents, one down by 6, one left at 0). Added some tube distortion, and some subtle stereo width. I then exported to audio a 2 bar loop of the sound. Deleted the synth so I was solely working with audio.

I then added some notch filter modulation via automation. re- rendered again. I then used the 1st audio clip and changed the ratio of the notch filter ( So either sped up the lfo rate or slowed it down) compared to the 1st render. And rendered a 2nd audio clip from that. I repeated the process several times, so I was left with around 8, 2 bar loops of audio, all of which had different automations going on in them. So now I have an audio channel, with 8 pieces of audio on it, and nothing on the fx chain (as all automations were done on the previous clip before rendering)

I then added a multiband distortion unit (Ohmicide) to affect the various frequencies differently. and again, made one audio clip from the 8 previous. From here, I chopped the 16bar loop (8 x 2 bar loops = a 16 bar loop), I took some bits out, reversed some others etc. Then put it into my sampler where I was able to use the audio as a midi sequence, where I added some pitch bends and glides, change notes etc etc.

Finally I rendered back to audio one last time, chopped up some more, split the frequencies, added some subtle overdrive to the low end, some delay and reverb to the mids along with a little saturation, and some chorus and flanger to the highs. All bussed back to one channel where I added a compressor to glue it all back together!







I think! ;)
 
Back
Top Bottom