[Joe Hanley]

I love this bass. Try this:

Oscillator 1: Square wave. 2 voice Unison with a mild amount of Detune to smear the tone. No Width on the Unison.

Oscillator 2: White Noise

Oscillator 3: Sine wave. Set this up to bypass the Filter and Effects. If your synth doesn’t have that option, then use a second synth.

Filter: Low Pass, 24 dB. Low Cutoff to create the round bottom-heavy bass tone. Decent amount Resonance. To be modulated by…

Filter Envelope: This will create the whipping wobble sound. Zero Sustain, with a really quick Attack (60-70 ms) and pretty quick Decay (360 ms). Give it a generous amount. Then, you’ll have to tweak the White Noise volume, Filter Cutoff, Filter Resonance, and Filter Envelope settings to get the whip just right.

Second Filter or EQ: This should process the Square and Noise oscillators only. Use a Highpass to remove everything below 120 Hz. Why? Since the Square wave has unison, it’s bottom end will be unstable. Sometimes it will be heavy, sometimes light, which is no good for a bass. So we remove it altogether here, and allow the Sine oscillator to maintain a steady low end

Compressor: I set the Threshold to apply about 6 dB of compression and left the other settings as is. But you can tweak to your liking

[Joe Hanley]

Chris Stannard wrote:

Attached is a sample of what I was playing around with using Korg’s Legacy Collection Mono/Poly.

I like the addition of the higher oscillator for a bit of brightness. That’s a nice touch.

Chris Stannard wrote:

Obviously not as powerful as the one in the video above

Try increasing the unison detune a bit, to where it’s just a little out of tune. I find that creates an aggressive tone. And if you can slap a compressor on it as well, that may help.

[Joe Hanley]

Very much so! Actively supported and continually developing.

We received a couple messages about this bug, that we responded to, but never heard back from. That must’ve been you. Maybe our response went to spam?

In any case, we recently posted a fix for this at https://syntorial.helpdocs.com/troubleshooting/im-on-windows-and-some-of-the-help-videos-have-a-blankblack-screen

Let me know if it doesn’t work.

[Joe Hanley]

Sounds like a synth to me. A couple key ingredients here:

Oscillator 1: Square. Usually these subby basses are Saws, but the use of Square makes this bass a little different

Oscillator 2: Sine, 1 octave up. For those higher notes this won’t make as much of a difference. But for those really low farty notes, the Sine will add body

Filter: Low pass, 24 dB. Turn the Cutoff pretty far down, and then give it some Drive for saturation and warmth

Amp Envelope: A little bit of Release, somewhere around 200 ms. This is one of those very subtle changes that makes the sound feel bigger/fatter.

Voices: Mono

[Joe Hanley]

I think FM is the best way to get that tone. I find higher pitch ratios work best to get that kind of shiny-bell-like tone.

And you could high-pass or band-pass it to make it a bit “cheaper” sounding, to get that cell phone effect.

While I would go the FM route for this sound, you can come close with subtractive oscillators, like the ones you find in Diva. Try stacking two square waves, with the second square up an octave + some number of semitones (I like 7). Then mix it so the higher octave is quieter than the lower one. This will create an upper harmonic that’s somewhat reminiscent of what FM does. Then high-pass for cheapness, and low pass some of the top end off so it’s not buzzy, and then drench it in delay and reverb

[Joe Hanley]

Chris Stannard wrote:

Will try to post some results

Please do!

[Joe Hanley]

You could get the spaciness a couple different ways. Try this:

Oscillator: Square wave. Unison with 4 voices, and enough Detune to smear it and create a little pulsation.

Filter: Low Pass, with Cutoff turned all the way up. Route a Triangle LFO to the Cutoff, very slow, and very little amount, so you end with up with the Cutoff lowering a little bit once in a while, creating an occasional rounding of the sound.

Voices: Mono. Set the Portamento to around 30ms.

Delay: Create a subtle slapback delay by setting the Time to 1/16, the Feedback all the way down so that you only get one echo, and just a little wetness, around 10%.

The combination of the unison and delay will provide that spacey effect.

[Joe Hanley]

GIGANTIC FACE MELTING TRANCE LEAD!!!!!!

I think both patches are the same. The key ingredient is tons of unison voices. I used Spire to do the following:

Oscillators: 4 oscillators total
– Osc 1-3: Saw wave, 9 voice unison, with the unison detune amount turned up to where it juuuuust starts to sound a little out of tune. This detune amount will give you the aggression you’re looking for. Also max out the Unison width so we get a big wide sound. Then detune Osc 2’s overall Fine pitch down a bit, and Osc 3’s up a bit. Now you effectively have a giant 27-voice unison. FACE. MELTED.
– Osc 4: White noise. Pitch it up 4 octaves and high pass it. We just want really high, hissy white noise. Also apply the same unison settings as Osc 1-3 to get a big wide sound. And dial up the volume so that it’s very audible, but blends into the other saw oscillators

Filter: High Pass, 12 dB slope. Turn up the cutoff just enough to take some of the frump off the bottom.

Amp Envelope: Bring the Sustain down pretty far, and make the Decay fast. Then bring the overall volume up to compensate for the volume lost with the low Sustain. Now we have strong attack transient.

Distortion: Dial in just a little bit of aggressive clip-style distortion. It’ll fight with the pulsating unison voices, and make it a bit angry. Don’t go over board here. Just a tad.

Reverb: Big size, pretty wet. Dampen it to remove some highs, so that only the body echos throughout the caverns.

Compression: Spire’s X-Comp knob is brilliantly simple. I just turned it up halfway and it squeezes the sound, making it even more aggressive. But any compressor will do. Just bring down the threshold until it starts to tighten up.

[Joe Hanley]

I have no idea what those two modes are actually doing from technical standpoint. But if you ask my ears it’s something like:

Gorilla: I agree, a very aggressive sync-like sound. I think all 3 fall within that description.

ART: Reminds me of a really resonant peak filter. The Width knob sounds like it controls the Q of the peak band, and the Pitch knob sets the frequency.

[Joe Hanley]

The Filter Drive will help you get that fat saturated sound. Try this:

Oscillator: Saw.

Filter: MG Low 24. Cutoff at at 227Hz. Drive at 50%. Turn down the filter level to compensate for the volume boost from Drive

Filter Envelope: Decay at about 1 second. Amount around 20

[Joe Hanley]

Send us an email and I’ll see what I can do.

[Joe Hanley]

Hi Simon

Great suggestion.

Audible Genius: Feature is already there. We use the Vimeo player which does an excellent job of speeding up the video.

Syntorial: We actually were working on it for a bit. Unfortunately Apple’s speed algorithm turned out to do some really strange things to the synth audio when sped up. In some cases, the patch being played in the video sounded significantly different from the actual patch itself, and since Syntorial is all about ear training, we have to maintain accuracy. So we have to either wait until Apple improves it, or separate and speed up the audio separate from the video with 3rd party DSP, while keeping both in sync, which is a bit of an undertaking. Not saying we won’t do this, but it probably won’t happen anytime soon.

[Joe Hanley]

That is INTENSE. This is all about getting the Filter Cutoff just right. Try this:

1. Oscillator: Saw

2. Filter: Low Pass, 24 dB slope, set the Cutoff pretty low (I tried around 80 Hz), to be modulated by…

3. LFO: This will create that triplet rhythm. Set the rate fast, waveform to saw. And then raise the amount until you start to hear those mids. The idea here is that the start of the saw will provide the midsy aspect of the bass, and the end of the saw will give us the bottom bassy sound. Will require some tweaking.

[Joe Hanley]

I’m definitely getting an FM Bass vibe from this. Check out this video I recently made on FM Bass (I’d watch the whole video to learn how FM Basses are made, but the video will start to get closer to the sound you’re looking for around 5:29):

[Joe Hanley]

Hey Raquel

There is one situation in which unison will sound identical to double/detuning, and it’s the one you mentioned: A single oscillator, 2-voice Unison, with no spread.

To deal with this in Syntorial, there aren’t SUPPOSED to be any patches that use Unison that way. So if you hear a detuned sound, and it’s narrow, and it sound like two voices, then it’s doubled and detuning.

Again, there aren’t supposed to be any patches like that. However, if you come across one, please use the Help -> Send Score option so we can check it out.