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[Sound Design] Because it's all about that bass.. (lemmy.ca)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I don't particularly care for dubstep but am more into traditional EDM, trance, electro-house. Basically, anything using simple or modified four-to-the-floor styles with heavy synth work. (Deadmau5, Rabbit in the Moon, Tiesto, etc, etc...)

Recently, I have been playing the game of "duplicate the sound" with my soft synths. I'll hear a song in my car driving back from dropping the kid off at school in the morning and then spend an hour or so with my soft synths duplicating a sound with its effects before I start work.

Copying Rezz has been interesting though. Her "signature" bass sound is a saw with a hair of distortion with some really cool (but still simple) LFO/filter work for rhythm. Add some traditional sidechain compression tied to a kick and most of the work is done. Where she excels is tying in lots of fx into the overall rhythm of the bass that seems to have lots of dubstep'esq influence.

That led me into (newer) dubstep with the drones, wobbles and all-around crunchy bass. Truth be told, it was an eye opener a few months ago when I discovered that most of the crazy "bass rhythm" sounds live above 500hz and that a basic sin wave below 500hz is all you really need for power.

My main issue is that I can't quite duplicate traditional dubstep and/or even super-clean wobbles. (An example here at 1:44: https://youtu.be/CNiLnw1t0UU)

I have figured out that (especially in the example above) that most of the sound is just lots of low and high pass filter work, probably tied to what I know as an "automation" in FL Studio. (I don't know if that is a general term or if it's FL Studio specific.) Hell, I was playing a couple synths tonight free-style and got super close to some of the key sounds, actually.

When I try and expand on that with, say, Skrillex type bass, I simply don't even know where to start or what tools and techniques to use to distort and destroy the bass line into something like dubstep.

I guess, after all of that, if you wanted to make some really crunchy bass lines, what techniques would you use?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I think you mostly got it, that kind of sound is really mostly about having an absolutely gnarly base sound and then just modulating it with lowpass filters and maybe some texture-changing effects.

Bit of a tangent, but as someone who is really into early UK-style dubstep that usually has very clean basses (i.e. the stuff that actually sounds dubby and possibly even 2-steppy) I prefer calling the skrillex-type stuff 'brostep', but that term didn't catch with most people. Probably because most people don't like calling their preferred genre something that's clearly intended as an insult.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I recently watched a documentary on the history of the original UK dubstep and how it transitioned into the more commercialized brostep. It did a good job of pointing out a lot of a absolutely distain for the newer genre brostep, actually. Hence, I really tried to focus my questions on the technical side of things and avoid anything that would even resemble Skrillex-worship. When it comes to raw sound design, there is still a ton of interesting nuggets in both styles that are super interesting to learn.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Definitely! There are a couple of brostep tracks that I really like, you can create some really nice grooves with that midrange modulation and I do generally like gnarly synths. Haven't really gotten around to trying my hand at that myself, though ...

And the disdain is real, the vibes of classic dubstep and brostep are just too different and it's pretty annoying to have the name of your genre usurped like that. There have been attempts to make up qualifiers to specify the classic sound (e.g. "deep dubstep"), but they haven't really caught on, either.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

So, over the last two weeks or so, I have listened to a lot of dubstep. The more I listened to brostep, the worse it got. For post-UK dubstep, the only two I can stand are Skrillex and Subtronix. The rest is just heavily distorted samples jammed together with what is basically static, all while trying to keep rhythm with a poorly sampled hip-hop drum loop. (I did listen to a bit of traditional UK dubstep, but it wasn't what I was after from a technical standpoint.)

But yeah, I think older dubstep has kind of been merged into modern EDM and brostep has just dissolved into some kind of strange noise that gets drunk frat boys to headbutt and jump through plate glass windows. (I only did a quick search, but I think even Skrillex has been moving away from brostep in some of his later work.)

I did find what I was originally looking for in FM synthesis. Once I discovered how easy it was to get self-oscillation going between a couple of waveforms, it became super easy to replicate a ton of old school house bass and some early Skrillex-type stuff. (If you cared, it seems a ton of old bass lines are based on a sine wave carrier with square wave modulation. You toy with the phase and harmonics a bit, and you can probably replicate 80% of 90's-00's bass lines with different envelopes.)

What I did learn from this adventure was worth the time: Every single video I watched on YouTube about designing sound for that genre was just bad, in hindsight. Excluding pure creative sessions, if you have to layer a fuck ton of wonky settings on an instrument and put it under 200 layers of an effects chain to get a specific sound, you are probably doing something very wrong. (I also learned that I absolutely hate "garage" brostep with a passion now. Sorry to kill the dreams of any 18 year old aspiring DJ's that might be reading this, but it's complete trash.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Interesting, Skrillex is one of my least favourite brostep producers. For me, most of his older tracks are way too chaotic to groove properly.

I'll have to try some FM synthesis. I always shyed away from it because it seemed overly complicated, but you're probably right that it's actually easier for some specific sounds.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I can understand how some people just wouldn't like Skrillex. Chaos is kinda the point and groove is probably not on the list of description words I would use for it. Alas, it's actually not my thing either. On occasion it is, but not always.

FM stuff is weird at first. Depending on your tool, just start with small changes as you build up a waveform, dust off your knowledge of harmonics theory and dig in. It took a day for me to make some noise that didn't sound like a knife scraping over a sheet of metal, and two more days of tinkering to make something cool. It'll probably take another month before I can design something more complex, like a cymbal. It's technically additive synthesis, but it's not actually? I dunno.