ambinate Posted June 2, 2009 Share Posted June 2, 2009 I'm looking for a little help on how to get good bass sounds that are just sort of smooth and plain. A lot of the samples and soundfonts I find online are a little too quirky for what I'm looking for, but whenever I try to make my own basses in something like Synth 1, they end up coming out not so great either. Usually they lack any definition and the notes become really indistinct around the lower octaves (C2-ish and below), and they just start to rumble and boom instead of sound like an actual bass. Does anyone have any advice or samples/soundfonts in particular they can recommend? Thanks a lot. (If you need examples of the type of bass sound I'm looking for, just let me know.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dannthr Posted June 2, 2009 Share Posted June 2, 2009 You're looking for a musical bass sound? Or are you looking for a bass woosh/hit effect? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ambinate Posted June 2, 2009 Author Share Posted June 2, 2009 You're looking for a musical bass sound?Or are you looking for a bass woosh/hit effect? Musical bass sound, for basslines and such. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dannthr Posted June 3, 2009 Share Posted June 3, 2009 Instead of simply down pitching your samples or synth, try applying high pass filters. When you down pitch a sample, especially, you're going to get to a point where there isn't enough detail in the sample to hold the sample together musically. For example, if you have a sample at C5, and you down pitch to C1, you're talking about running the recording 16 times slower than the original. That means if you have a sample that was at best recorded to 20khz of aural detail, then you've just shrunk the detail of the recording to include at best 1.2khz or so. That's probably why you're getting a rumble (samples can have a lot of sonic detail that at that pitch change would sound like trash). Now, if you're using synthesis, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to down pitch a simple synth wave to get a clean bass sound. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ambinate Posted June 5, 2009 Author Share Posted June 5, 2009 Ah, I see what you're saying about the samples. I'll have to try out applying some filters and see how that works out, thanks a lot. I dunno about the synth stuff, though. Just as one example, here's a rough version of a song I was working on a few weeks ago: http://www.tindeck.com/listen/foyw I made the bass with a pretty simple sine wave patch, but for whatever reason, it doesn't really sound very distinct, and once more instruments are added in, it just loses most of its presence in the mix and there isn't really an audible bassline anymore. The lowest notes are sort of iffy throughout, too (and if I'm listening on anything other than my headphones, the bass is hard to detect). Some of this probably has to do with equalizing and mixing, I'm sure (which I didn't do a whole lot of), but I'm assuming some of it just has to do with a crappy bass sound, right? Is there anything I can do to improve the bass sounds I'm getting? Thanks again! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dannthr Posted June 5, 2009 Share Posted June 5, 2009 A simple sine wave is a fairly unobtrusive sound to begin with--you can get things out of its way though by carving out a pocket in your eq spectrum for it. Instrument basses, like an electric bass or an upright have more character and presence because of all their upper-end harmonic details. A simple sine wave is going to lack these. You could try layering sine waves on top of it or other wave forms to give it more bite. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zircon Posted June 5, 2009 Share Posted June 5, 2009 IMO layering sine waves is not usually effective. It tends to sound muddy. You really need upper harmonics, mainly because the ear can extrapolate from harmonics the existence of a fundamental and actually reinforce it more. A computer, however, does not do this so low sines just clutter the mix. My favorite bass waveform is constructed using one or two pulse width modulation oscillators (pulses w/ LFO -> pulse width), filtered using a lowpass filter. Very phat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harmony Posted June 5, 2009 Share Posted June 5, 2009 My favorite bass waveform is constructed using one or two pulse width modulation oscillators (pulses w/ LFO -> pulse width), filtered using a lowpass filter. Very phat. That's pulse width modulation and that's a cool sounding effect. We'll probably cover that in another tutorial... My entire musical life has stagnated without the PWM tut that was promised to us. Are you holding out on us, or have you made it and I just missed it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ambinate Posted June 13, 2009 Author Share Posted June 13, 2009 Thanks a lot for the help, again. I haven't been able to work on getting the bass sound I want for the past few days, but I should be able to this week. My synthesizer knowledge is pretty basic so I haven't done much with LFO's yet but I'll experiment with pulse width modulation, it sounds really cool and like it might do the trick. On a much more stupid note - I looked back through some of the presets and soundfonts I was using again and realized that most of the basses were already pitchshifted down an octave or 2, which explains why they were breaking up when I played below (what I thought was) C2, hahaha. I dunno why I didn't think of that before, but it made me feel really dumb. Thanks again for all the responses. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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