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I’m struggling to replicate the deep bass drone in this track. It waxes and wanes through the whole piece, but you can hear it really pop out for the first time at 0:17.
For reference, I’m using Primer with Ableton.
It sounds like the raw waveform is a sinewave, with heavy portamento and legato enabled. But it also sounds like there’s some waves of wildly varying amplitude and distortion. I’m trying to use Ableton’s Tremolo effect for the amplitude variations, but I’m not sure what filter will give the right distortion effect (Primer’s doesn’t sound quite right). It also starts doing this weird pulsing thing at 0:46 that I don’t even have the vocabulary to describe.
Here’s my current attempt: https://soundcloud.com/1fbe1318/omnissiah-bass-sample/s-rVFhz61xlCG?si=83d96eaef2fe4025bfdc2932e6037c11. Any advice?
Try this:
Oscillator: Pulse wave, medium-ish Pulse Width. 4-voice Unison, with fairly heavy Detune, and don’t align the start phases of the Unison voices as you don’t want a big attack transient on the first note (in the case of Primer, just turn off the Start button).
Filter: Lowpass, 24 dB. Bring it pretty far down until it’s nice and round. Now the filter and unison will kind of fight a bit to create that rolling and rumbling sound. Make sure you’re playing a low enough note. Boost the res up to give the sound a bit more shape, make it sound less flat.
Voices: Legato, and heavy Portamento to really make the notes bend between each other.
Reverb: Big size, but just a little wet. The sound should be up front with the echoey hall behind it.
Occasionally in the recording it gets really nasty and bright. For this turn up Distortion as needed.
Thanks Joe, I’m excited to try all that this weekend. Frankly, I’m relieved that your suggested mutations are so numerous; I’d naively thought that this would be a simple sound to reproduce, so I was frustrated that I had so much trouble with it.
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