Dubstep wubs

The Studio
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I usually draw varying envelope curve sequences for bandpass filter modulation of the cuttoff with either love philter or an envelope controller and sometimes i sidechain the wubs to the kick…and then use high pass filter automation modulating the hp cutoff…then glitch it by automating gross beat time patterns.

I dont use lfo sequences…they are too boring and not fluid enough.

To synthesize the bass i use odd tunings and higher harmonics with messed up phases…and i have one oscillator 1 acting as a wierd lfo while another oscillator 2 is modulating the lfo with some other oscillaters additionally modulating oscillator 2.

In sytrus i use the xy module to make 2 synth patches in one instance of sytrus. I could probably do more but i havent tried…

Ni fm8 you could do a lot more with…but the ui is different…than sytrus…

As for fx…i use vocodex, a scouch of mono chorus, waveshaper distortion and eq to modify the sound…

For resampling i either use a beat slicer of a granular synth fls granular synth chops up transients and you can resequence and modulatr the granular parameters and time stretch…

Harmor i have not mastered its resampling capabilities…and im not spending most of my days at this point generating a bunch of resampled sounds and sifting through whats usable..

Ive had faster results manually chopping up bass samples and modifing them with fx and pitch modding and even using different time stretch algorithms…

Not knocking harmor but its very tricky and very labor intensive to make usuable sounds from it.

If you master harmor more power to you

Basically my approach to dubstep is like the bass should be like a river of water but still have a rhythm while simulatenously changing over time…

Basically in dubstep i treat the bass like how one would treat the drums in breakcore.

And the more complex the sound the more frequency space it will use in the spectrum…

So if you want to use it a musical context…keep it mind you gonna have to cut out the frequencies that clash with other elements in the frequency spectrum.

Also when it comes to sound design gotta balance it out with not making your computer crash when thinking outside the box on how to make a sound…

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Nobody likes to hear it at first, but the secret to designing sounds in FL (including Harmor) starts with a ‘P’ and ends with ‘atcher’. If you want proper macros, routing, attenuverters (every DAW has them on tap and in easily-accessible places, whether you know what they are, use them or not), you also need to pull out a few formulas and use a couple of elementary-math functions.

That’s not to say that it isn’t worth it, if you’re a diehard FL user. But you’re missing very important features and parameter access if you forgo Patcher. Right-clicking and activating knobs gives you the access that people in other DAWs and environments already have.

Image Line is banking on you just punching in random numbers into Autogun like everyone else. Thank god they actually still support patcher, even though its plugin compatibility needs some TLC.

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Nuh uh

I hardly use patcher ever, and still manage to pull of some pretty stupid shit with basses.
Okay, I have one patcher preset, and it’s just a bunch of 0% wet fruity reverbs to make shit
w i d e.

Really I think bass design’s not so much about twisting knobs, but instead being creative.
I mean, listen to the bird tweet bass in “In The Place” by Space Lanes
You’ll hear it, I’ve never heard of Space Lanes using patcher before.

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There’s no wrong way to design sounds and different things work well for different people, but sometimes being able to base everything off of the same macro, EG or LFO quickly (with scaling), or even integrating plugins into the aforementioned workflow can really expand your sound palette.

A lot of newbies think you need a whole bunch of EGs or LFOs doing a million different things to make cool sounds (although this often ends up just making noise), but often times you just need one or two doing the heavy lifting on a bunch of different parameters.

Bass is usually the easiest IMO, since you don’t really have to anticipate them being used for chords and they’re generally monophonically-voiced (even though oscillator stacking schemes can vary). The rest of the chain is usually just set up for a mono voice, so modulating an interesting wavetable and adding a little bit of spice can sometimes be enough. I tend to crank out bass packs in about a day for that reason; a simple setup and just creatively redesigning wavetable frames or borrowing from outside sources can often change the sound drastically.

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Ah, see therein lies the difference
Because I use the LFOs and effects built into serum 2 (you can add a lot more than what FL’s mixer allows) I don’t really need to use patcher to control everything. Automating a knob that links to a parameter is a bit pointless to me, when you can just automate the parameter itself.

Phaseplant is even better for that, because it has a lot of things that serum 2 does not (albeit being a bit less user-friendly,) but bass music sounds are fucking weird, dude. Ever heard of vomitstep?

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Yeah, Serum, Phase Plant and even Vital do this really well. I think that’s why people get so frustrated with Toxic Biohazard and Harmor, though. Another added benefit is being able to rope other plugins into the mix, so that if you have an external LFO in Ableton or something, it can control both a macro on Serum and some plugins that are attached to it, like a frequency shifter or something really bizarre. Thankfully it’s all there in FL, though, just a few steps involved.

I’ve never heard of that! Is that like that disgusting Otto Von Schirach album? :smiley:

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Not quite, but it’s actually kinda cool.
It’s a genre basically made by SNAILS
The bass is filtered in such a way that it has a guttural “vomiting” character, listen to frog bass:

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Oh, wow. This was way better than I had envisioned. No gross factor :smiley:

Also reminds me of some of that early brostep energy from that other thread. This isn’t nearly as annoying as a lot of the modern stuff I’ve heard. Honestly I might have to dig into this one a little bit!

Also, have you ever attempted brostep-oriented stuff? I feel like you’d be pretty great at it

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Ik, pretty sick, eh.

Hey look, some of the new stuff is okay, but it just feels very generic, as if it’s trying to be good in all ways.

Look in @bfk 's bassline competition thread
Check that shit, that’s my first attempt at dubstep.

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I think something that is underutilised for this kind of thing is FM. It really opens up the amount of things you can modulate to add movement to wobs or whatever it is

Assigning modulations or automating to your FM operators you can add some crazy timbral movement that you can’t really get with normal synthesis

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Synths like absynth are powerhouses but the ui is so complex and they maybe very cpu intensive. Which may require someone to bonuce and freeze things as a sample.

But if a compex ui doesn intimidate or phase you more power to you…

However if you know what your doing you can achieve similar results sometimes with native plugins or even using modular elements or environment.