The secret is distortion and some white noise

formant filters

layering

frequency splitting

he has several little noisy treble bits panned around at one point during the bassline. the panning enhances the stumbling effect created by the timbre of slightly different attacks interrupting each other. lots of distortion, mostly very dry sounds each with its own slot in the frequency spectrum and timing (micro-pespective). generally there are three layers going on: sub (which is probably the same sound throughout), then the growling formant and then some presence in the form of brutally high-passed, gated, bit-crushed, FM'ed and distorted stuff (not necessarily all those but those are good places to begin) with lots of crunch. there might be more layers or fewer, but I think he always uses at least two sounds (either two VST's or two split channels from one source VST) for the bass in this track.

(the reverbed bass suggestion is very dubious).

sorry far hap-hazardly written, though hopefully insightful, post.

I'll see if I can get some patches sorted for you (moving house, so not a hell of a lot of time for anything music atm )
Last edited by GeorgeZ on Tue Feb 28, 2012 12:14 am; edited 1 time in total

+ 1

How did you make your beat so loud without clipping or distorting the kick and bass?

Sidechain compression (was done pretty nasty and quickly... you'll actually hear the bass "duck" down in volume for the kick and the snare every time they hit. In general you'll want to fine tweak it so you can barely make out the "ducking", just hear huge bass and a thumping kick with no distortion or phase cancellation etc).

Sounds to me like the bass has a high octave sync added to it, maybe three octaves over three oscillators, bottom one being sub/sinewave and the other two being hard-sync and sawtooth, and some heavy overdriven distortion in the high end, while the low end keeps its subby growl... I'll have a play tomorrow if I can and see what i can do.

thanks for everyones help! doubt my cpus gonna be able to handle this

wow massive drop :O is it possible with sylenth or massive?

I just knocked this up quite quickly using one instance of NI Massive for the main bass, and then one instance of Ableton's Operator for a sine wave underneath.... Then lots of overdrive.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10601699/permalinks/DomKane_Excision Bassline.mp3

Let me know if it's any good, and I can upload the Ableton project, or the Massive patch, or whatever.

D

@domkane wow nice :O can u upload that massive patch and tell a litle bit about your changes in ableton?

yeah, really nice. I'd love to check out the patch and Live set.

-dw

A lot of clipping and distortion imo

No worries, here you go guys.

Ableton Project - http://goo.gl/0SL9J

NI Massive Patch (Main Bass) - http://goo.gl/kjYAA

Screen shot of FX Chain after the "Main Bass":


Hope this helps. I'll leave it in my dropbox for a while, so feel free to share those links around if it helps

Cheers,
D

Not an exact answer to your (ie. not just for this song, but his bass sounds in general), but close enough, AND answered by excision himself:

http://www.dubstepforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=844390&sid=abf91 ef0927b4a84b704b9a80661f75c#p844390