Hey guys, today i'm gonna let you know how to make clean, but distorted bases! This has been a hot topic lately and has been frustrating for a lot of people who can't seem to achieve "clean distortion" on their basses. The link of the finished result is posted below. Anyways, let's get started! First of all, you're going to have to select your wave of preference. For this bass I used saw waves. Sine waves can have much cleaner results, but it's up to you. Put the amplifier ADSR envelope settings that you want for your bass. After you are done constructing the bass sound that you want to have (before distortion), you can apply any compressors, EQ's, or any other effects that you desire your sound to have.
After all of the effects are on, go ahead and put a lowpass (or high cut) filter on the bass. REMEMBER: the filter has to be AFTER all of the effects. The purpose of this is to get the bass as clean and deep as possible, but make sure that you can still tell it's a "bass." After that, you can apply the decimator/bitcrusher. REMEMBER: the distortion has to go AFTER the lowpass filter, otherwise the distortion trick won't work. For my sound, I used a free vst plugin called "CMT Bitcrusher." I will also have the link for that too . You can now mess with the settings on the distortion to get it just how you want it. Remember, certain settings are going to be dirtier than others, so you might have to turn the nobs a little to find the right area where the sound is distorted, but clean. Hope that can help increase your knowledge of producing some sweet basses! Also, I would love to see what kind of basses or sounds any of you have made, so feel free to post them here

P.S. my bass might sound a bit dirty, but it's because it's a saw wave bass and I didn't take much time to make it as clean as possible. Don't worry though, this technique is legit

Links:

My Bass: http://soundcloud.com/itsnano/wawobble

CMT Bitcrusher VST: http://freemusicsoftware.org/category/free-vst-effects-2/bit -crusher

you should do these regular and it looks like your enjoying it as well.
Good stuff, what about envelope and resonance settings, say how do i get a dico house type wow bass with a nics stabby attack?

I would make sure your amplifier envelope settings have an attack around zero (0), decay at zero, sustain at full, or farely high, and maybe some release, but depends. Next, make a "pluck" bass with the filter cutoff envelope. The settings on the filter cutoff envelope should be 50% attack, 30-45% decay, 0% sustain, and 25-40% release. To get that "wow" bass, I usually put resonance up to around 40-70% and cutoff at around 25-40%. Then I would apply the method I just described about distorting the bass with decimator distortion. EQ is crucial though, I usually sweep through and find frequencies that are annoying and take them out to get a cleaner bass. That should bring you to your "wow bass" that you were talking about Hope that helped

that is nice (although not useful for what I do). just wanted to say thanks as I appreciate everyone who tries to be helpful. that snare sound is great, what did you do for that?

I stacked 3 snares: one for punch, one for noise, and one for the main body of the snare. EQ'ing and compression is also needed in order to get the desired frequencies in the snare you want, and to glue all 3 snares together. It's not just going to be given to you in a sample pack

P.S. snares were taken out of the vengeance electroshock volume 1 and vengeance house essentials volume 1 sample packs.

for big bass sounds like this, i have had a lot of joy lately putting a band bass on sawtooths in sylenth and using the camel crusher and ohomicide (or however you spell it) to make them come to life so to speak!!

Dunno, that 'ringing' is somehow unnerving.

You're going to have to find those ringing frequencies in your EQ and take them out, but be as precise as possible so that you don't take away too much from the sound. Also, it doesn't absolutely have to be a decimator/bitcrusher, it can be overdrive, foldback, digital, or any other type of distortion. The results are still pretty good.