How effective is NI Massive for making Basses For the deeper darker side of dnb?

H

HyperonDnb

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Feb 16, 2011
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I want to know all your opinions on using massive for basslines, preferably more geared towards the deeper darker side of dnb, im talking, the styles of Amoss, Ulterior Motive, DBR UK, Hybris, Subterra, etc etc, ive started to layer seperate instances of massive on top of each other to create a similar sound, is there any other way?
 
It's much more about the end result than the way you do it.

I've gotten good results with just doing a simple square bass, making multiple variations of it (like 1 with a slow filter attack, 1 with LFO, 1 with fast attack and slow decay etc) then splitting it to 2 or more bands and fucking the highs up with distortion, autofilters and wah's, and keeping the sub layer much intact.

Those guys' sound you mentioned, has a lot to do with resampling I guess. You just play around with your stuff, draw some wacky automations and play back the result and pick the best pieces. Then process those again in a new way etc. It's not rocket science, in fact it's much more 'back to the roots' imo, using samples, simple sounds and straightforward beats.
 
yeah re sampling has a lot of effect, ive never really fully understood the whole concept, though i may have used it in some form, could you be kind enough as to explain the basis of it?
 
Yeah. For example in my last tune I used sampling and real-time processing:

I made a square bass that had a slow attack on a 6db/oct LP filter opening up - a very slight filtering. Few oscillators detuned slightly, with a little 'spread' (not sure what that is exactly). With Rob Papen Predator softsynth.

I made a wav of that sound and threw it into my sampler, distorted a little and did a similiar filtering to it, to emphasize the opening up of the sound. Then I recorded that to FLstudio, and it became the basis of the bass sound, the first long bass sound in the attached clip. Then I added a compressor to that to keep the sound more steady, EQ to boost the sub frequencies and a LFO filter to make it wobble just a bit.

After using that for a while I wanted more movement to the bass and because I still had the original Predator patch in the project I started on that - I made a few clones of the VSTi and changed each one slightly - changed a single oscillator, put an LFO on the filter, used a different kind of envelope etc.

I directed all the synths to the same FX channel, split it in half. The sub was neat, just compressed, EQ cut above 200hz wasn't absolute, some mids came through but it sounded alright. For the high channel I just went crazy with processing. Camelphat 2 with a harsh distortion and volume-controlled filter envelope with high resonance - mixed 50/50 wet-dry. EQ with the lows cut off and a mid-boost, Voxengo boogex mixed quietly (25wet), 2 highpass filters with different LFO speeds that I could swap - I didn't want to automate the lfo because it messed up the sync. lowpass filter to muffle the sound when needed, compressor with heavy pumping and a reverb.

When it sounded interesting enough I made a bassline using the different synth versions I had created and started to draw automations for the filters in the high channel and in the synths themselves. When I had a tune's worth of material I bounced the tracks to wav and moved to audio editing. Here I noticed that the bassline was kind of all over the place so I picked the best bars and replaced the weaker ones with those and slapped on a slight saturation on the bass highs.

I probably never could reproduce the sound exactly but to me that's the fun part of it. It's not exactly like the sound of those guys you mentioned as they seem to rely much more on the sub but I like to add more grit to the bass.

I've been thinking of doing some youtube shit about this too.
 

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