[Othello Ma]

Trying to remake Bass that comes in at 38 seconds

[Joe Hanley]

I love this bass patch. It seems simple on the surface, but the detail makes it interesting. Try this:

1. Oscillator: Saw

2. Amp Envelope: Short notes. Sustain down to zero. Set Decay and Release to about 440 ms.

3. Distortion: Go with an overdrive-style distortion. Crank it. It will sound bright and nasty until you put on the…

4. Filter: It’s important that this comes AFTER the distortion, as we’re going to modulate it. If it was before the distortion, the distorted tone would change as the filter changes. We just want the brightness to change. Set it to a 24dB Low Pass. And bring the cutoff down until you get that nice round, warm, farty (face it, this patch sounds farty) tone. Turn up the Resonance a bit to make it stick out a little. Then modulate the cutoff with…

5. Filter Envelope: Same settings as the amp envelope. You’ll have to tweak the Cutoff and mod amount to get it to match it just right. Extra: if the filter has Drive, and you can modulate it, route the same envelope to the Drive to add a bit of extra filter saturation to boost the attack transient.

6. Pitch Envelope: The pitch drops a little at the very end of the note. Route an envelope that has max Sustain and a medium Release around 750 ms to the oscillator pitch. Set the modulation amount to about 1 semitone up. This will cause the pitch to drop one semitone during the release stage. Now, this also means the oscillator’s perceived pitch will be transposed up a semitone, so transpose the oscillator’s pitch down 1 semitone to compensate.