ZZT - Worm - Tearing / Ripping Bass Effect (Help Please!)

[Narrator]

i'm after making a bass i really like but i'm completely lost here trying to figure out how to achieve that choppy tearing effect you hearing on alot of electro house tracks over the past few years.

i've tried everything from pitch/phase/cutoff modulation on the envelope and all sorts of lfo modulation but nothing i've tried seems to work so far or i'm obviously not doing it right.

the effect comes in after the break at the 2 minute mark



I'd really appreciate some help or feedback on this.

thanks

oh yeah, i'm using Sylenth1 if that helps.

[allcentury]

you're talking about that really fast tearing effect right? in my opinion man its 1 of 2 things (i'm on a laptop but i can hear it pretty clearly, surprisingly) 1.) the synth was printed to audio and it's sampled (with a small space at the end of the 1/32nds). i do here a sharper attack on it so either sample the beginning of the note hit or put a transient shapper on just that section 2.) it could just be a "beat repeat" type sound with a very fast sync'd rate, again prob 1/32's or 1/64ths. really the tearing is just a stacking of the note hit.

just my 2 cents, i'll try it when i get off work

[Narrator]

you're talking about that really fast tearing effect right? in my opinion man its 1 of 2 things (i'm on a laptop but i can hear it pretty clearly, surprisingly) 1.) the synth was printed to audio and it's sampled (with a small space at the end of the 1/32nds). i do here a sharper attack on it so either sample the beginning of the note hit or put a transient shapper on just that section 2.) it could just be a "beat repeat" type sound with a very fast sync'd rate, again prob 1/32's or 1/64ths. really the tearing is just a stacking of the note hit.

just my 2 cents, i'll try it when i get off work

thanks for the insight there..

i've heard it done recently where the bass would come in and then this ripping effect would be added even though it doesnt sound as if the character or tone of the bass itself hasnt changed at all. anything i seem to do colours it in some way.

here's a track i've heard recently where this happens after a minute in but doesnt really change the bass itself.

http://soundcloud.com/riptide/demo-preview

[Kemmler]

I'm pretty sure all you need to do is take a saw, pitch it really low and have the the pitch slide up and down in some way with the beat, and then probably have a short plate or room reverb on it. Also there is some sidechain compression or ducking on it. Also, try mixing in a sine one octave up with inverted phase to keep the bass sounding coherent.

[Narrator]

I'm pretty sure all you need to do is take a saw, pitch it really low and have the the pitch slide up and down in some way with the beat, and then probably have a short plate or room reverb on it. Also there is some sidechain compression or ducking on it. Also, try mixing in a sine one octave up with inverted phase to keep the bass sounding coherent.

yeah i havent tried layering a low saw with a higher octave sine.
i just slightly detuned 2 saws at minus 2 octaves but it just sounded too low and lost the effect when moving up the scale on the midi keyboard seeing as the waves moved faster.

[Kemmler]

the key is that anytime you need it to "rip" you have to play at such a low note that each impulse in the saw wave is audible or nearly audible individually. You can enhance that by adding a bit of a tail to each one with the reverb. I think generally you blend this effect with higher notes using legato or pitchbend.

e: definitely NOT a detuned saw though. If you detune it you lose the distinctness of each cycle of the waveform which is what produces this sound. The sine doesn't matter because it's only one harmonic.

[Narrator]

the key is that anytime you need it to "rip" you have to play at such a low note that each impulse in the saw wave is audible or nearly audible individually. You can enhance that by adding a bit of a tail to each one with the reverb. I think generally you blend this effect with higher notes using legato or pitchbend.

e: definitely NOT a detuned saw though. If you detune it you lose the distinctness of each cycle of the waveform which is what produces this sound. The sine doesn't matter because it's only one harmonic.

yeah that makes sense alright..
the phasing in the wave cycles does take the edge away from the ripping effect.

i seem to have this habit of instantly adding 3 oscillators in Sylenth1 and processing sounds forgetting that alot of producers work on really simple ideas alot of the time.

[Gamma-UT]

I had a go in Albino on a hunch that this sound depended heavily on which order you use effects. As said above, the key lies in having a low note. The advice on another forum was to have two saws, one playing an octave above the other, and to have them synced. Then - and this is the key to the sound - pass it through a high-pass and low-pass filter in series and then compress it mightily (because the waveform at that point is practically inaudible). The high-pass goes down to about 30-40Hz, but this cuts out a lot of the very low-end energy and gives enough of the rasping effect needed to make the patch work, it seems.

The original advice was to do it low-pass followed by high-pass, but I had more success in going high first, then running the sound through the compressor with ratio at max, threshold at minimum and attack and release at minimum on the basis that this would force the compressor to pump based on the low-frequency tone. Then, obviously, turn the gain all the way up. (I'm wondering whether an expander might be a better idea for this bit). Lengthening the filter attack helps control bumps at the start of the sound.

I then ran it through the Albino phaser followed by the FX filter - set to low-pass 12dB, very high saturation. Result: not only a ripping bass effect but, with the right phaser effect, that gnarly bass used by Royksopp on a couple of their tracks.

The bad news is that I have failed to repeat this on Sylenth. Albino may just happen to have the right kind of filter to pull this one off - a lot of other synths are a bit too gritty at the very low end. Twin2 might work well with this sound if it is a filter thing. With Albino, I felt that having the LP filter follow the compressor and phaser made a lot of difference, so it will probably need outboard FX to pull it off with Sylenth. I also haven't fully grasped how best to use sync in Sylenth, which I think is making a difference.

[Awake1077]

As Gamma was saying, this sound is dependant on the raw sound of the sawtooth oscillator on your synth.

Here's an attempt using Reason4's Thor synth:

http://www.AwakeAudio.com/Samples/TheWormTest.mp3

Its just a raw saw osc through a 4-pole lowpass filter. Set the cutoff frequency to whatever you want the bass to sound like when its not doing the stutter/chop sound.

The trick is to use portamento to do all the sliding/bending for the melody. Use the pitch wheel to drop the sound down to the lower registers and create the stutter effect. If you play with the pitch bend range you'll get different 'feels' to the stutter when its laid over your groove.

I also set the pitch wheel to modulate the filter cutoff in the mod matrix with a negative value. So when you drop the pitch, the filter opens wide and lets the full rasp of the saw osc through.

To try and make it more like the ZZT track, I added a square osc and octave higher, and just turned it on and off.