what makes a 'bass overdrive' a 'bass overdrive'?

[OMNIFEX]

IMHO Simply the best.


http://www.voxengo.com/product/lfmax/

[friteuse]

My favorite bass overdrive is feeding a fender precision bass through a VHT Tube DI-Box and a LA-610 Preamp from UA with gain rised until a warm and fat overdrive can be heard. Hard to beat that...

Well, beside the all analog way, I also get very nice results with Amplitube2 (one of the bass presets to start with) and CamelPhat behind with its tube saturation.

You also can try the PSP MixSaturator for slight and warm overdrive, esp. with the Valve2 setting and a small amount of bass warmth.

[TrevorMag]

It sounds like it's more of a soft clipping rather than the harsh hard-knee clipping you tend to get with normal distortions.

Here's something I posted back in March:

To my ears, the best-sounding distortion algorithm is the sigmoid function:

Code: Select all

return -2/(1+exp(aVal))+1; 

I use that in a bunch of my plugins - you could audition it with the freebie Steroid Bouncer, or dig deeper with the Psycho Toolkit bundle (Trash Triode in particular).
There are probably waveshaper plugins that use a similar formula. It's softer than plain clipping, and you never lose all the detail of the original signal, so when you push it hard you get a compressed character.

I haven't tried it much on bass, but it sounds like the same approach kritikon was describing. Jupiter8's idea (distort the treble part, leave the bass frequencies alone) is also valid. You could even try combining those two approaches with Steroid Bouncer (freebie) - a very different application from what I wrote it for, there's serendipity for you

[rpc9943]

i could never get much out of baxxpander..

and someone mentioned blockfish- what kind of settings? just crank the sat up?

RonC

[kritikon]

and someone mentioned blockfish- what kind of settings? just crank the sat up?

I would imagine that's what he means. Sascha did code some nice saturation thingies.
As far as a compressor (or soft-limiter) goes, you basically just whack up the input way too loud and have fastest release and attack, so that you get a quick cyclical squashing. Threshold is almost immaterial for that, although the lower the threshold the more distortion you'll get (up to a point). When I mentioned VCA compression overdrive...it's probably more the actual input overdrive that feeds the sound and the compression/limiting adds to it. Trouble is you can't really do that in the s/w realm...you can do the soft limiting and compression, but not overdriving the input. That one really is the realm only of analogue gear. And again...analogue limiters can do musical distortion, I've never found a s/w limiter that can distort nicely - in fact the opposite, they usually distort extremely nastily (some people like it though...)

Another nice effect is to overdrive a desk input (some desks most definitely do it better than others). And I was always loathe to do it too regularly...the last thing you need is to start blowing expensive mixer channels..


Years ago there was a fad for big overdriven 909 kicks. People try all kinds of convoluted tricks to get a similar effect in s/w, whereas all you need to do is feed it through a desk and push the input up to taste. Try it with 303s too...much better through a hot desk than through any nasty s/w distortion (IMO).

And I always found the better (and more expensive) the desk, the more musical the overdriven channels sound. I would imagine a Trident or such would sound great. But try renting some fancy studio time and suggest you just want to run this kick at +25dB overhot through your posh desk please.

[shinken]

What you've got to ask yourself is: what does it look like when you turn the distortion knob? An analog scope will show you the truth.

[gonzo]

In GuitarRig2 that's what I do :

Split the signal, insert filter followed by BigMuff fuzz on one of the splits, mix to taste.

Sounds nice, if you like extreme bass sounds - like Muse.

[Lagrange]

i could never get much out of baxxpander..
RonC

I actually prefer X-CITA.. I have to 'apply it' several times in Adobe Audition and then cut and paste what I want back to the original to give the 'saturation' feel so it's not that straight forward..

BTW

Is there a convolution scheme that could possibly solve this issue? I've been getting more and more into convolution of late and I'm would be interested in using it to saturated bass!??

L

[Lagrange]

People try all kinds of convoluted tricks to get a similar effect

Name some specifics plz!!

[Jarlath]

If you've got an old tape recorder lying around you could record a hot signal onto that, then record it back to your DAW.

I suppose the results wil vary according to your gear, but I did this some time back with a Yammi tape deck and an old tape - and was pleased with the results. It provides analogue saturation up to overdrive and grit, according to how hot the input signal is set. Worth a try....?

[kritikon]

kritikon wrote:
People try all kinds of convoluted tricks to get a similar effect
Name some specifics plz!!

Well, one way you might try to get a driven kick-through-a-desk type sound might be to use a few processes and mix back in with the signal. Something like an overdrive plugin (or distortion where you can tailor the shape of the clipping to a softer knee...Cyanide would be a good example, or Pocket limiter at very high settings), then use a multiband comp to filter out the highs and possibly the subs or anything below 60Hz or so and squash it down a bit, then pass it through Eqs and filters to fine tune it a bit more. A very good filter to use for that type of sound would be the one in Cubase (Tonic, I think it's called?) which has a lovely soft overdrive control before the actual filter and gives the filtering a lovely warm character. Not much resonance on the filter, certainly not enough to self-oscillate.
Another filter would be the impOSCar one - again it has a great soft overdrive within the filter. I believe they licensed the filter algorithm to someone else...wasn't it Spectrasonics? On one of their S&S thingies, so you might well be able to configure it to load your own kick samples into it.


Another process which sometimes gets close-ish is to run it through a fast LFO to get a very quick bubbling type thing going and then put another straight resonant lowpass filter with an envelope on it. An LFO preferably that'll go almost fast enough to use as an oscillator on its own. There was a preset on the old Roland AlphaJuno that was remarkably like a desk-driven kick, and I seem to remember it was just fast LFO or fast chorus then a long resonant filter envelope. You increase the squelch just by fiddling with the resonance on the filter, and adjust the general tone by speeding up or slowing down the mod LFO. I can post up the patch settings some time (although my AlphaJuno is packed away now, so it's not just at hand without being a pain in the arse.)

Even something like Mobilohm from OhmForce can make some quite characterful squelches akin to an overdrive type sound (it's generally a bit too discernible as digital to be real close, but it still gets in the same ballpark). I think even one of it's presets has part of the sound - can't remember the name of the preset...Gorgo or Glorg or something like that. It's basically again a very fast LFO on the phaser, and the Mobilohm sound also puts an LFO on the speed of the phaser LFO to get extra movement...so you'd just reduce the amount of LFO on the LFO to stop it deviating too much. You can fine tune it so that the LFO on the phaser works over a short enough time and syncs with the length of the kick sample. And as Mobilohm has some filtering, you can take out some of the top end to make it a little warmer.

Another plugin that is useable is RetroDelay - it has the very useful feature that you can apply the envelope of the sound itself onto the LFO speed or depth. Can't remember the settings off the top of my head, but I remember using the envelope feature. Then you'd probably also have to run it through some more distortion and filtering etc.


And you can mix all of those together. It's still alot easier just to overload a desk input though.

[emdot_ambient]

Another plugin that is useable is RetroDelay

Haven't tried it really on bass, but it does have a built-in distortion FX. This is one really handy plug that's often overlooked 'cause the name implies it's only delay. But it's really a multi-FX unitl with delay, distortion, reverb and filter, plus several modulation options for filter and delay.