Bass Sound Design: 808s, Plucks, Growls and Sub Bass

hello and welcome back to the channel today I'm going to be carrying on the sound design series by looking at some essential bass sound design I'm going to be introducing and looking at four simple bass tones the 808 bass a punch or pluck bass a saw or growl bass and a simple sub bass before we get started all of these bass tones sound like this [Music] so those are the bass sounds that we're going to be looking at in this video I'm gonna be introducing the sound to you and briefly showing you how to create it from scratch using a synth in this tutorial I'm going to be using serum which is a third party synth while serum is not a stock plug-in I do think that the graphical interface really helps everyone beginners and advanced users actually understand what's going on and you should be able to take all of these fundamental concepts and apply them in any synthesizer but without further delay let's just get right into it the sound we're starting with is that 808 sound which originates from the tr-808 drum machine but a modern 808 bass is actually quite removed from that original sample the producers used to use a or nine times out of ten when you hear an 808 in a track it's usually a producer using a sample from a sample pack or from their own sort of library of sounds for instance I have a sample of an 808 bass from a decap drum pack if I just play it here and all I do is just drag that on to my channel rack open up a piano roll and I just manipulate a pattern until it sounds the way I want and that really is how most people would use an 808 but there are producers who like to synthesize it from scratch and this gives you just a lot more control over the sound which is what we're going to do and there's loads of different ways to make an 808 more punchy or more gritty or dirty but we're going to go through all of that so don't worry so I'm starting with an initial patch of serum just a clean patch and the first thing we're going to do is we're only using one oscillator and I want to select a sine wave so in serum I'm going to go into basic shapes and there it is loaded up as a sine wave so if I play this that's what I get when I play in a lower octave just a really simple clean sub sound the next thing I'm gonna do is shape this envelope so I'm gonna take the attack all the way to zero for now just so that I get a bit more punch out of it I'm gonna take the hold to about three or four hundred and then I'm gonna turn the decay to one and a half seconds and the sustain all the way down so you can just copy these values here and what this gives us is a punchy attack it holds and then it decays down just like this now you can hear a little bit of a click at the start of the sample so I'm just gonna increase the attack a little bit until the click goes away so that is the basic sort of fundamental tone of the 8 way now what I like to do is add a little bit of sort of distortion to the wave table so what I do is I usually turn like Bend plus or minus on and then I just warp it a little bit like this just to give it a little bit more character this next step is really crucial if you want a really punchy 808 so I'm gonna go on to a different envelope in this case envelope 3 you can simply copy the settings that I have here ataque 0.5 hold 0 decay I'm gonna take down to about 35 milliseconds 34 sustain I'm gonna take down to 0% and release I'm just gonna leave on 15 milliseconds so I end up with this really short sharp envelope and then I go to my matrix and I'm gonna set the source to envelope 3 and the destination to global master tune and what this does is it uses this envelope here to quickly modify the master tune which gives a really sharp sort of punch kick drum sound at the start so if I increase the amount so that's too much there's somewhere around about there when you get it sitting somewhere in the middle you can get like a really nice kick sound at the start of your 808 which can really make the 808 feel a lot more punchy the next step is to go into your effects now this doesn't have to be within the synth this could be on your channel rack or in your just a fax rack and the first thing I'm going to do is add some distortion just some tube distortion just gonna drive it a little bit take the mix back a little bit and you can drive this as much as you like I've heard it away it's not distorted you can do whatever you want with it really it's just a bit of distortion to make it interesting and then it usually doesn't hurt to add a little bit of EQ take it down to maybe like about a hundred Hertz and then just boost it up a little bit just to get a little bit more boom out of that low-end and that is really the fundamental basis of this whole sound now if I play it along with the rest of the beat I have here now the only issue I can hear is that my kick drum is really really punchy and the 808 it's also punchy so I could address this with sidechaining or I can just increase the attack on my 808 samples so maybe around 80 to 100 milliseconds let's see what this sounds like [Music] so overall it sounded quite punchy but that was because this kick drum was providing all the punch I needed at the start of the sound whereas the 808 just fills in the gaps so while sidechaining is essential sometimes you can just adjust the attack of your a to wait a bit and it just makes it naturally fit around the kick without the need for too many plugins a final touch for 808 switch is a little bit more advanced it's just creating another envelope to adjust a filter filter cutoff that also just adds a little bit more punch and pluck to the sound but it's really not essential for this and if you watch my other sound design videos you'll learn exactly how to do that using this synthesis trait forward the next bass sound that we're going to be looking at is a punch or pluck bass that sometimes called a house or a deep house bass just because of the genre it's typically used in and this base is really commonly used with sort of like four on the floor kick and clap dance rhythms and as the name suggests is defined by a really punchy plucky nature so let's take a listen to it by itself and then with some drums so let's create this sound from scratch so again starting with an initialize preset what I'm going to do is just select a wave shape I'm going to select basic shapes now this works with a lot of different wave shapes signs saws squares but I'm gonna do it with a square wave just to keep it different and initially this is going to be really really buzzy and loud you might have noticed earlier that we had a really wide pluck sound so what we're gonna do is we're gonna have one low oscillator that's just providing a steady mono bass and then later on we're gonna add a second oscillator that's going to be playing some higher frequencies and they're gonna be stereo spread just so that our sound still feels really solid but also sounds really modern and wide I'm going to change the voicing at the bottom here to mono so that we're not overlapping any notes and what I'm gonna do is turn this filter on and I'm going to select a low-pass twenty-four filter now I'm going to shape this envelope to adjust the adsr of the sound so the shaping of the sound so I'm just gonna add a tiny little bit of attack there's going to be no hold on this sound because as soon as it gets to maximum I want it to cut straight back down so I'm gonna then take the sustain all the way down to about here and then add a little bit of release to the sound so let's hear what this sounds like [Music] so we have the volume shaping but it really does not have any punch or pluck to it and that's because we need to automate the filter so I'm going to take this same envelope and just drag it onto the filter cutoff and I'm going to adjust this until it sounds good initially that sounds okay I'm also just gonna drive the filter a little bit this adds a little bit of sort of saturation to the filter so that sounds really nice really clean now the second thing we're gonna do is add a more interesting oscillator at the top so for this I recommend just testing out lots of different wave shapes there was one that I found in here that I quite liked and I think it was Paul PWM Juno and then with this one selected I'm just gonna increase the voices of unison I like adding you know maybe five maybe seven voices of unison something like that and let's just see what this sounds like I'm gonna make sure that oscillator B is also going through the filter here and [Music] I'm just going to adjust the level so if I now just play the second oscillator on its own just make sure the detune amount is right you've got a really nice and wide sound but because there's not a lot of bass in this sound it's not really muddying this really solid sound here what I like to do with this sound is add a little bit of reverb and delay so I'm just going to turn the delay on turn the reverb on and let's just see what this sounds like okay so the first thing I'm going to do just looking at the reverb is just adjust the low-cut so that I'm not getting too much low end on the reverb just something interesting like that and then I'm going to adjust the delay here [Music] adjust the mix down a little bit adding a little bit of reverb like that can really help fill out this sound now you've got to be careful with reverb on the low end sometimes it's better to add this with a separate plugin where you can really cut the low end out of the reverb that kind of goes quite a long way in making it sound a little bit more professional then what you can also do is add all sorts of different you know stereo widening plugins and whatnot but you've got to be careful with these on bass sounds usually you know everything below about a hundred or 150 Hertz it's generally quite good to keep that mono there's no set rule sort of set in stone but when you're starting out it's good to keep that in mono so that you can really keep a check on your mix and then if you want to go crazy with stereo widening feel free do it in the higher frequencies it tends to sound better that way the next bass we're going to be creating is a saw or a growl bass specifically a sidechained bass because it sounds really really cool so this one is really straightforward in serum at least because the default wave shape is already this sawtooth wave that we want so if I just play that initially that does not sound too great so what I'm going to do is add a filter just to take a little bit of the high end now I'm going to add in the second oscillator I'm going to increase it to quite a few voices of unison maybe seven or eight voices D tune them slightly again I'm going to select mono voicing [Music] and already we have this really super wide sound with the adsr it doesn't really matter too much I would just say make sure that your release is very short because you want this sound to cut away when you stop generally you don't want this one to die away slowly you want it to cut away quickly and it doesn't even matter if there's a bit of a click or pop at the start because this sample is so abrasive and aggressive that you probably won't notice it anyway what we are going to do however is make the LFO control the volume so that we're going to sidechain this sound so I'm just going to go into this folder and I'm going to select a sidechain this one looks okay and then I'm going to link it to the levels here so now if I just play this one it's side-chaining so it really fits around that kick a lot better now and I'm going to do the same thing for oscillator B so I drag the LFO onto this and then I just drag the start back to there lengthen it a little bit like this and they should both have a sidechain effect to them right away [Music] you also want to make sure that on your filter you have be going through the filter as well and then what I like to do is set up this cutoff as a macro that I can control so I can just control it from here but what I quite like to do is to set up a macro just here so that I can control it from this macro down here so by press play [Music] so that's a really simple and quick sound but it also sounds pretty professional tuck it under your track and it just can be a lot more interesting than just a simple sub bass sometimes again with the effects and the processing with this sometimes adding some subtle delay and reverb can work really really well sometimes I set the delay and reverb up on a macro just like I did there and then I can sort of blend the reverb and delay from the front panel as well another thing to note with this sound in particular I find that if you go on to sort of your global tab and you adjust the oscillator setting to the highest quality possible-- it often stops any weird stereo artefacts happening it just keeps the sound really really clean and also with this sound it can sometimes sound a little bit thin and buzzy what is interesting is that although this is a distinctive bass sound what makes it distinctive has nothing to do with the low frequencies it's all that high buzzy frequencies so sometimes just grabbing an EQ and boosting the low-end just a little bit or quite a lot even if I go to say a hundred and forty Hertz and just boost a bit [Music] that really just thickens up the sound maybe a bit too much but you know it makes it sound a bit more like a bass again as opposed to like a mid-range kind of instrument and last but certainly not least the final sound we're going to look at is a simple sub bass so again with any synth this is really straightforward I usually select a sine wave so basic shapes the sine wave or there's one inside serum called analog BD sine that sounds really really great one voice of unison pitch it down a little bit inside your oscillator or play lower down on the keyboard adjust the attack so that there's no clicking and adjust the release so that it dies away not quite instantaneously so if I've played this for you I'm gonna show you why it's important to have that attack at you know around five milliseconds or so so that's nice and smooth if I take it down but if you don't you got that little click at the start so you just want to make sure there's a tiny little bit of attack on the sample and ink the same with the release you don't want to hear that click at the end and again with all these bass sounds it's often great to stick it on to Mono mode and this just means that when you play multiple keys they're not going to all overlap so for instance if I play a couple of keys here they're all just going to smoothly flow from one to the other whereas if I take mono off we're gonna get that kind of thing going on when we overlap keys and you don't want that so just keep it on mono simple absolutely lovely so thank you very much for watching the video that covers all four basic sounds all those presets are in the description along with much more information and as usual there will be more advanced videos on these topics and there's many many more advanced and basic videos on the channel if you're interested in finding out more but thank you very much for watching I hope you have a great week and I hope to see you in the next video - bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 382,659

Rating: 4.9708333 out of 5

Keywords: Bass Sound Design, fundamental sound design, sound design, music theory, music, production, music production, how to make bass, how to create bass, bass synths, how to bass, bass design, serum sound design, serum bass, 808, how to make 808s, better 808s, growl bass, pluck bass, house bass, sub bass, 808 sound design, best 808, 808 tutorial, serum lesson, serum tutorial, future bass, theory

Id: H6i55lXAMh0

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Queqzz]

I feel the great teachers are the ones that explain, not just the steps, but also WHY they made the decisions they did. This guy seems to do that almost every step!

[u/SubtotalBroom]

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[u/Hazem_Medhat]

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[u/HJK501]

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[u/HellmutLang]

nice and he works with serum too

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[u/anothermonster1]

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[u/numoonchld]

Thanks for sharing

[u/mindkingdom]

In The Mix is awesome, I discovered him some months ago and absolutely love his style of explaining and workflow.