I'd probably be using massive for this, since I ordered Komplete Synths.
I've uploaded a few parts of tracks where the baseline is prominent.
This is the kind of bass I'd like to create:
rounders bass
http://www.mediafire.com/?wgscmzr5j9m
gataplex bass
http://www.mediafire.com/?eyl5sdlcyve
symphonatic bass
http://www.mediafire.com/?vgeexgdbutg
mush mushi bass
http://www.mediafire.com/?gymwllgddmk
ja sei namorar bass
http://www.mediafire.com/?zw9zx5k3hk3
How would I do this in massive, or if another synth is better...
Thanks.
How do I make fullon/goa/psy bass sounds?
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halluci:nation halluci:nation https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=188866
- KVRer
- Topic Starter
- 26 posts since 8 Sep, 2008
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- KVRAF
- 5948 posts since 19 Jun, 2008 from Melbourne, Australia
Well that pretty much covers every psy bassline ever written 
They are all a variation on the technique I will now describe.
Don't know Massive - I use Albino - and I know a lot of other folk who swear by cheap n cheerful / free soft synths for this job, particularly because they are light on CPU. It's probably the most frustrating part of the psy sound to get right because if it isn't "just so" the track won't sound "psy", but once you know how it's probably the easiest bit. It is wise to get your kick and bass right before you start adding other elements to any psy track, but YMMV.
There is a nice little video tutorial from Cosmosis on the midi patterns you need right here:
http://cosmosis.co.uk/cosmosis-bass-secrets-info
The midi programming is quite simple, and you can use the velocity of the notes to create different rhythms. You will also want to adjust the length of the notes which can have a huge effect, and also the precise timing of the notes in midi-tick terms i.e. it is not always wise to quantise to exactly 16th notes - 30 midi ticks ahead might do the trick depending how your DAW divides up the timing between notes.
The length of your kick drum can have a huge impact also - generally the kick drum decays right up until the very start of the first bass note, not a moment more, not a moment less. If the kick tail is interfering with the bass notes, I've been informed it will sound really bad on a large rig - and we don't want that do we?!
You can see the interference if you open up the kick / bass in a wave editor and zoom in on the point where they meet - experiment to get an idea.
Some would say use your ears, but depending on your monitoring setup and experience this might not be possible.
Sound wise, set your oscillator (single or multiple depending on the sound you want - a simple saw is a good start) to quite a low octave so it's spitting out plenty of low frequency. Envelope for the oscillator and amp section is just sustain to full - no attack, no decay - and the shortest release possible without a nasty click.
This main trick is getting the filter envelope right to emphasise the pluck of the bass, this is just an example:
Shortest attack possible, decay set depending on the amount of pluck you want. At 145 BPM you could try just over 100 ms ... the sustain portion is set to a medium value. The release is going to be about the same as the amp and the oscillator settings i.e. very short.
In the filter / modulation section you set the filter envelope to control the cutoff of a LP filter in a positive direction with (usually) zero resonance. The cutoff should either start at 0, or perhaps around the fundamental frequency of your bass note i.e 100 Hz or similar. This is not set in stone however.
When a (midi) note is struck, the filter envelope will pop open for the decay time producing a nice pluck, decaying to the sustain value for the duration of the note. The sustain value on the filter envelope determines the amount of higher frequencies will be present in the overall timbre of the bass note after the decay. It's bass we're dealing with here, so you probably don't want too much interfering with the other sounds higher up in the frequency spectrum so keep it medium ish.
You generally don't want the velocity to effect the filter, or have keytracking on. Just controlling the amount of filter with the filter envelope should be enough.
FWIW, Albino is great for this sound because you can adjust the *curve* of the various envelope parameters and this is very useful on the decay stage of the filter envelope, which mimics the behaviour of the Access Virus envelopes. It has a huge effect on the type of pluck sound produced. There may be other ways to achieve this with modulation, I've not tried that approach.
For EQ you want to remove any muddiness that will take away from the perceived volume of your low end. A general dip around 300 Hz will help clean things up.
To take this further, you can use an EQ to remove any resonant peaks that tend to form around the peaks in the wave form of your bass timbre. These are minute cuts (high Q and up to -5 dB depending on severity) between 200 and 500 Hz. You can find exactly where to cut by sweeping a very thin EQ at a high gain around the resonant peaks of your bass. When you find a resonant peak, you will hear an ugly ringing sound which is what we are trying to minimise here. The more precise your EQ is the better your results.
Please be careful with your speakers and ears at this point i.e. turn everything down while you do this.
Using this overall technique you should not need to compress your bass line at all unless you are looking for a particular compression style effect, or side chaining the kick and bass together so your bass notes can play at the same time as the kick via the ducking technique - probably a more advanced technique and one that is used in house music a lot.
Regarding the kick - usually because you make your own from a pitched sine wave or using FM techniques you can determine it's "note" and it would usually be one octave lower than the bass line. The kick and the bass are output to the same buss are then compressed together so that they act as one cohesive whole rather than two distinct elements. There are probably a million techniques for doing this in the quest for a particularly fat sound.
If you listen very carefully to the overall sound produced by these two elements playing together - perhaps "meditate" on the beat for a while - you might notice that the timing is not as tight as required for the trance effect, it sort of pops in and out of feeling "just so". This will either be because the relative volume of the kick / bass is not right, because of the specific timing of the bass notes in relation to your kick drum as I mentioned above or because of the velocity and length of your bass notes needs to be adjusted.
Note: everything will be in mono up to this point.
On top of all that you might have another bass like timbre in the higher octaves, with the low frequency content cut out via EQ. It will mirror the bass line note for note and on this instrument you can add all sorts of fancy effects and filter modulation to create a bass line that seems to be really wide and rolling around in the speakers. Chrous, phasers, reverbs, delays, whatever it takes to get the effect you want. This will most likely be compressed with the real bassline on a separate buss before compressing with the kick as mentioned above.
Hope that helps you make trance and not war
Peace,
Andy.
They are all a variation on the technique I will now describe.Don't know Massive - I use Albino - and I know a lot of other folk who swear by cheap n cheerful / free soft synths for this job, particularly because they are light on CPU. It's probably the most frustrating part of the psy sound to get right because if it isn't "just so" the track won't sound "psy", but once you know how it's probably the easiest bit. It is wise to get your kick and bass right before you start adding other elements to any psy track, but YMMV.
There is a nice little video tutorial from Cosmosis on the midi patterns you need right here:
http://cosmosis.co.uk/cosmosis-bass-secrets-info
The midi programming is quite simple, and you can use the velocity of the notes to create different rhythms. You will also want to adjust the length of the notes which can have a huge effect, and also the precise timing of the notes in midi-tick terms i.e. it is not always wise to quantise to exactly 16th notes - 30 midi ticks ahead might do the trick depending how your DAW divides up the timing between notes.
The length of your kick drum can have a huge impact also - generally the kick drum decays right up until the very start of the first bass note, not a moment more, not a moment less. If the kick tail is interfering with the bass notes, I've been informed it will sound really bad on a large rig - and we don't want that do we?!
You can see the interference if you open up the kick / bass in a wave editor and zoom in on the point where they meet - experiment to get an idea.Some would say use your ears, but depending on your monitoring setup and experience this might not be possible.
Sound wise, set your oscillator (single or multiple depending on the sound you want - a simple saw is a good start) to quite a low octave so it's spitting out plenty of low frequency. Envelope for the oscillator and amp section is just sustain to full - no attack, no decay - and the shortest release possible without a nasty click.
This main trick is getting the filter envelope right to emphasise the pluck of the bass, this is just an example:
Shortest attack possible, decay set depending on the amount of pluck you want. At 145 BPM you could try just over 100 ms ... the sustain portion is set to a medium value. The release is going to be about the same as the amp and the oscillator settings i.e. very short.
In the filter / modulation section you set the filter envelope to control the cutoff of a LP filter in a positive direction with (usually) zero resonance. The cutoff should either start at 0, or perhaps around the fundamental frequency of your bass note i.e 100 Hz or similar. This is not set in stone however.
When a (midi) note is struck, the filter envelope will pop open for the decay time producing a nice pluck, decaying to the sustain value for the duration of the note. The sustain value on the filter envelope determines the amount of higher frequencies will be present in the overall timbre of the bass note after the decay. It's bass we're dealing with here, so you probably don't want too much interfering with the other sounds higher up in the frequency spectrum so keep it medium ish.
You generally don't want the velocity to effect the filter, or have keytracking on. Just controlling the amount of filter with the filter envelope should be enough.
FWIW, Albino is great for this sound because you can adjust the *curve* of the various envelope parameters and this is very useful on the decay stage of the filter envelope, which mimics the behaviour of the Access Virus envelopes. It has a huge effect on the type of pluck sound produced. There may be other ways to achieve this with modulation, I've not tried that approach.
For EQ you want to remove any muddiness that will take away from the perceived volume of your low end. A general dip around 300 Hz will help clean things up.
To take this further, you can use an EQ to remove any resonant peaks that tend to form around the peaks in the wave form of your bass timbre. These are minute cuts (high Q and up to -5 dB depending on severity) between 200 and 500 Hz. You can find exactly where to cut by sweeping a very thin EQ at a high gain around the resonant peaks of your bass. When you find a resonant peak, you will hear an ugly ringing sound which is what we are trying to minimise here. The more precise your EQ is the better your results.
Please be careful with your speakers and ears at this point i.e. turn everything down while you do this.
Using this overall technique you should not need to compress your bass line at all unless you are looking for a particular compression style effect, or side chaining the kick and bass together so your bass notes can play at the same time as the kick via the ducking technique - probably a more advanced technique and one that is used in house music a lot.
Regarding the kick - usually because you make your own from a pitched sine wave or using FM techniques you can determine it's "note" and it would usually be one octave lower than the bass line. The kick and the bass are output to the same buss are then compressed together so that they act as one cohesive whole rather than two distinct elements. There are probably a million techniques for doing this in the quest for a particularly fat sound.
If you listen very carefully to the overall sound produced by these two elements playing together - perhaps "meditate" on the beat for a while - you might notice that the timing is not as tight as required for the trance effect, it sort of pops in and out of feeling "just so". This will either be because the relative volume of the kick / bass is not right, because of the specific timing of the bass notes in relation to your kick drum as I mentioned above or because of the velocity and length of your bass notes needs to be adjusted.
Note: everything will be in mono up to this point.
On top of all that you might have another bass like timbre in the higher octaves, with the low frequency content cut out via EQ. It will mirror the bass line note for note and on this instrument you can add all sorts of fancy effects and filter modulation to create a bass line that seems to be really wide and rolling around in the speakers. Chrous, phasers, reverbs, delays, whatever it takes to get the effect you want. This will most likely be compressed with the real bassline on a separate buss before compressing with the kick as mentioned above.
Hope that helps you make trance and not war
Peace,
Andy.
Last edited by ZenPunkHippy on Sun Nov 14, 2010 6:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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halluci:nation halluci:nation https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=188866
- KVRer
- Topic Starter
- 26 posts since 8 Sep, 2008
Thanks! that was very helpful. I don't understand all of it at the moment, but enough to make a decent baseline.
I'll keep looking back on this.
I'll keep looking back on this.
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- KVRAF
- 5948 posts since 19 Jun, 2008 from Melbourne, Australia
No problem! That information was culled from various forums around the net after I figured out I really didn't know what I was doing and my bass lines sucked. It still took a few weeks of experimentation with kick drums and bass lines to understand the elements enough to repeat at will.
Patience is a virtue, eh?
A couple more tips: you will want a medium EQ cut on kick drum around 300 Hz for the same reason as the bass - muddiness and perceived volume. You can put a light boost in the mid frequencies (around 1.5 Khz) to emphasise the thwackiness of the kick.
Put a light overdrive on the bass sound at around 3 KHz to emphasise the higher frequencies which helps create the perception that the sound is actually louder than it is.
*All* of these variables are up for experimenting with once you have the basic sound down.
Peace,
Andy.
Patience is a virtue, eh?
A couple more tips: you will want a medium EQ cut on kick drum around 300 Hz for the same reason as the bass - muddiness and perceived volume. You can put a light boost in the mid frequencies (around 1.5 Khz) to emphasise the thwackiness of the kick.
Put a light overdrive on the bass sound at around 3 KHz to emphasise the higher frequencies which helps create the perception that the sound is actually louder than it is.
*All* of these variables are up for experimenting with once you have the basic sound down.
Peace,
Andy.
... space is the place ...
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- KVRian
- 1211 posts since 7 Aug, 2006 from Geelong, Australia
Everything sounds better with dynamics:camsr wrote:yeah thanks zenhippydude that put a lot of things into sense.
I just wanna pitch in and say dont overcompress because psy trance sounds infinitely better with dynamic.
Compressors compress the dynamic range (difference between loud sounds and soft sounds) of a piece of audio. Don't ever think they do anything different. The trick is to know when to compress, and when not to compress, don't just slap one on because you usually do or someone said it was a good idea.
I actually use transient shapers and volume automation more than compressors.
