What I've been doing as an experiment is to get Sound forge to generate
a square wave - feed it into my emu, add a bit of chorus and play it at
about
C1 on the keyboard
HOW TO MAKE KICK ASS BASS SOUNDS
The secret to a kick ass bass patch is the right balance between lower level ENERGY (what you feel) and upper level CHARACTER (what you hear). Your weapons in this battle are:
1. Your BASIC SINE WAVE- the "bottom end" that people feel. I do all my sound design at C , so for bass sounds I keep a sine wave at C1 on hand at all times. Someimes I use this (or one at C2) as the original source sample, effecting it directly and whatnot, but SOMETIMES NOT(see step 2)!!! If I do, I make sure I keep a copy of the C1 sample for step 3, below.
2. Your arsenal of samples and effects, combined to make sick, phat layers of upper harmonic-rich sound. Your sources can be ANYTHING- waveforms, a horn/piano sample, a vocal sample, whatever. Layer a couple of these, effect them, then grab another effected stack and layer again. The secret is to BE CREATIVE, and also to KEEP GOING!!! Dont run a stack of saw waves through distortion and a flanger and expect to get something new and fresh.
3. A bass sound with too many upper harmonics (and not enough lower) ceases to become bass (bass just means any LOW sound- if you play the left side of a PIANO you are playing BASS). After stacking and effecting so much theres a good chance you lost your original low frequency harmonic- add it back again now if you have to by restacking the original C1 sine wave. The C1 wave is your secret weapon to ensuring your bass sound doesnt get wimped out!!!
4. After you have a nice patch of rich, phat noise, run the ENTIRE THING through this ultimate of weapons, the low pass filter. This is what you use to "fine tune" your sound. As you slowly turn the knob down, you will hear the upper harmonics you stacked start to shave off (the C1 sine wave willl stay untouched of course). Again, the secret is to stop when you get the perfect combination of CHARACTER and ENERGY- you want some top level detail but you also want it to "feel" like bass . By using an envelope, You can also let the listener hear more upper harmonics at a different part of the sample- In this case you want the majority of the envelope to fall at the meaty sweet spot you found. A short sweep is all you really need to add interest, and ensures your sample/patch can be used later to play alot of different melodies (as opposed to a long one that becomes a melody in and of itself).
(Waahoooom!!!) ;)
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