Alright, this is sub-focus. We're going to do a nasty synth bass for you right now.
Starting off we're going to be using Massif and we're starting off with just a basic
saw wave. The first thing I'm going to do is put the unison up to three and basically
de-tune it so it sounds wider. Think of it as the basic sounds like that and then we're
spreading several other saw waves around it, de-tune to make it sound fatter. That's what
our basic sounds. Now I'm going to put a notch filter on it here to put a subtle kind of
phasey movement to it and we're going to use the performance LFOs which basically allow
you to do more complex patterns than normal LFOs. A normal LFO you'd have a basic sign
wave modulating filter where you can have these complex steps which are already set
up to get the sound really moving. I've already routed that to a band-task filter so once
that's on, get the sound really moving around. There's also some glide on there and it's
monophonic. To flavour up a little bit I've also got some distortion on it from the effects
section and I've also put a further distortion on an insert and the routing here. There's
also a further oscillator here to give it a bit more bite. It's one of the digital oscillators
called Scrap Yard on the Mac Sift so you get that kind of extra growl. You can change
the flavour of that by moving the position of the wave so that's a really sort of resonance
and then that's a slightly different kind of growl there. You can change the amount
of movement on the sound by varying the amount or changing the amplitude of the LFOs. Changing
the band takes it from being quite thin to getting the LFOs on sort of recent type sounds.
Right, here I'm just going to sort of do a basic. I'm just going to do a bit of a
simple lead patch. These type of sounds you get used a lot in John Bass where they're
kind of fun. It's basically a really simple sound. It's a saw wave again put through unison
so it's basically a detuned saw wave and by doing that you kind of get this kind of bigger
sound to it. Firstly I'm going to just turn out the unison C3 and make sure it's unscented
as well. All the other saw waves are kind of centred around the one basic note. Then
I'm going to spread it out a bit wider sounding now. Basically just put the delay on it. The
inbuilt mass of the delay. I'm going to put a little bit of 1,3,0 rise as well. There's
always so you can put a bit of, I usually put a bit of like a high pass modulation on sounds
like this just to get a tiny bit of variation in the tone in the sound as the breath goes
on. I'm going to put this high pass on to basically a slayer if I kind of get a subtle
sort of movement on it. That's basically it. There's a lot of things you can do to
make it a bit more of a tackier sound but I'm just going to keep it with the high pass.
So that's it. Right, I'm just going to do a bit of sub bass as well. One of the most
important things about the sub is it generally should be chibin mono. Basically I've got
a really simple sub bass patch here in the zeta which is just a sine wave. I've got the
option of putting a little bit of an air phase of pitch on it slightly fluctuates in pitch.
One trick I do as well a lot is have very small glides in the beginning of sub bass notes
so I'll just exaggerate a bit so you kind of get a little bit of a push off from the
start of the note. So it's almost like a kick but it tends to like, it's not a fail
save but sometimes you do get a really nice kind of push off on the note but essentially
sub bass is really simple. There's not a lot but you don't really have a lot of flexibility
aside from the basic pitch of the note. I mean generally with drum bass stuff there's
always a sine wave sub bass underneath everything else and kind of you end up taking bass sounds
like the LFO bass that I was using earlier and layering them together and basically
just taking out some of the low end of the more mid-rangey sound to make space for the
sine wave. It kind of works in different ways from other forms of dance music like in generally
in some house music you get the kick a lot lower whereas in drum bass you have the sub
bass is like the lowest element most of the time. So to kind of make space for the frequencies
you generally have your kicks within the rhythm higher and also the trendy sounds have very
low endy snares. Basically you kind of end up sort of EQing into the hits to get them
to sit in the right ranges and actually changing the pitch of the hits as well to kind of
make them fit in the right brackets. So here the snares like I basically when I'm putting
beats together I use some frequency analyzers a lot so I'll take that very completely into
the wave a bit and just show you what I mean. So here you've got the bounce beat, this is
a beat that's probably about 10 layers of different sounds and you can see on the spectrum
you can see where all the hits are actually hitting. So generally the snares kind of coming
around between to live 150 and 200 hertz. That's kind of standard for a lot of drum
bass now. Although it's not the rule and the kicks generally hitting around 80 to 100
rather than low then often I'll take a tiny bit of lows out of my kicks with the EQ just
to make a tiny bit of space for the sound. But sometimes I won't. As I say it's not,
these aren't hard and fast rules, it's just the way that tunes the tend to sound these
days. Those are kind of ranges at which all the hits are hitting. So yeah this is a beat
recently put together in Cubase. I just thought I'd walk you guys through a few of the elements
that make up the beat. Basically I do all my beats in audio so these all just chucks
up audio files. I've actually chucks up within Cubase and basically my sound especially with
the beats it's all about layering really. Here I'll just go through some of the layers
with you guys. So there's this break which is like a classical break. That's for some
of the shuffle and some of the flavours to the loop. And I've also got an aim in there
which is this loop. Notice that the snares are taken out to kind of make space for the
main snare. Those are sort of to give the groove of the loop. Next I've got the main
kick layer. This is just one of many pre-prepared hits that I've done. In addition to that I've
got a slightly sort of EQ'd out at low volume ghost kick running. So it's just adds like
slightly more kind of interest to the rhythm again. And that's also layered in this kick
here. So that's all the kicks. And then I've got my snare layers and this is like, so here
it's like quite a wide sort of splashing sounding snare. I've got this which is more of an attacky
kind of higher snare to give a bit of like bite on the front of your snare. And then
I've got the main snare which is here. And that snare is again one of the ones I've sort
of pre-prepared. Basically the secret to it is boosting the low end of it. So around
200 hertz for example. It'll vary according to what snare you're actually using. It's
quite long. And sometimes once I've kind of EQ'd that in I'll do a bit of compression
afterwards to kind of rain in what I've boosted into. But it's sort of about EQ boosting really
in order to kind of get it to sit in that sort of low end area. So then when you hear
it in the club it kind of really punches through. It's not just sitting up there in the treble
it's kind of quite, you know, it makes the beat sound really full as well. In addition
to that I've got a couple of those snares ghosted just to add to the shuffle. And then
I've got a bunch of hi-hat layers as well. I've got this beat here which is just a really
simple break to kind of just add sizzle on top of the loop. I've got some hats with that
as well. Auto sort of sizzly and then some more like rhythmic ones on 16s. I've got a
little shuffle pattern here as well. Some of these are quite wide as well just to kind
of basically the higher up, generally the higher up the sort of frequency spectrum you
go. I don't hear the sound slightly wider. So not necessarily pan but just have sounds
that aren't totally mono. Whereas all the lower sounds, even though they are actually
stereo waves, are basically essentially mono. Like if we bring up the snare, it's basically
a sound on both sides. Going back to the snare there's some hi-hats which are slightly wider
but there's none of the low frequency stuff that's going on there. It's all high stuff.
So together it sounds like this.
I guess that's about it.
