In need of some help with learning to make dubby saturated sub bass

Production
21

I usually lowpass my subs to avoid this, starting to roll off around 70-90 i think…

22

Start with a fundamental sine wave at ~50Hz.

Add harmonics in one or some of these ways:

  • Additive synthesis
  • Additional oscillators
  • Lowpass another wave eg saw, square, triangle, etc
  • Saturate/waveshape
  • Overdrive a preamp
  • Overcompress

Add movement by automating modulation of:

  • Frequency
  • Amplitude
  • Filter (even on a pure sine wave for a different tremolo effect)
  • Saturation drive/wet
    Or by adding portamento

Get it to to agree with the kick using any of:

  • Highpassing the kick between 50-100Hz (eg 80Hz)
  • Using non-100Hz overtones eg 150Hz, 75Hz. Squares and Triangles have odd overtones.
  • Side chaining.
    Then your snare’s fundamental sits around 200Hz, so pay attention to that if necessary.

The reason higher sub notes sound louder is because of the equal-loudness curve which compressing will not solve. You will have to manually adjust the velocity.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Lindos4.svg

2 Likes
23

thanks for all this advice, im trying to take all this in haha, i will post a clip soon and if any tips spring to mind its highly appreciated

24

Get some free guitar amp plugins, they are great for creating extra grit on your song.

25

depending on where you’re listening you’ll also get one note that resonates louder than other notes. If you’re listening in a room with speakers this will be the note where its waveform fits exactly into the space of the room (floor to ceiling for example), making it resonate and thus making it sound louder

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26

get a program that can tell you what note a sample is playing (melodyne etc)

then find some drum machine bass or hardware synth bass samples on the net

like 808, 909, older weird machines etc

then layer one of those sounds as the sub/ the lowest part of the bass

then you saturate that slightly

you will quickly see the reason as to why people talk about hardware all the time… because a soft synth sine wave will not handle saturation in a pleasant way… you will basicly only hear the other vsts effect on top because its so clean in nature

the saturation on top of hardware samples will seem like they bleed or liquify or something in comparison.

27

Maybe you could find somebody demoing an analogue synth.

28

this is what ive got so far, still loads to go on it, if anyone has any tips based on my clip please do let me know! https://soundcloud.com/bean-zo/clip-dubstep/s-jpH6B

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