Yes…so I flipped back and forth on doing a full tutorial and I don’t think that I want to do that. I don’t want to hand over a cool sound so everyone can do it but puts no work into learning it. I do want to help and share some info that I learned and some speculation that I have about how Skrillex does his growls though!
I have been really obsessed with the evolution of Skrillex’s growls…like how they started and how they changed. The basis behind all of this obsession is that if you can categorize the core sound, then you at least know a starting point to work with and then you can bridge out to a characteristic sound. I think this is also really important to understand too because this is how you take a “current” sound and turn it into a unique sound…if you are lucky / skilled, maybe even a signature sound.
So here is what I am thinking has happened. His early growls would be like his SMANS growl and that is made from a yoie bass I think. If you listen to Hey Sexy Ladies, the growls are mixed in with yoie basses so I think that is a good guess that he morphed yoie basses into growl basses for his early ones. Jaymac made a really good tutorial for one that he made from a yoie patch. LINK So he calls this first of the year remake but the growl sounds more like SMANS to me.
I think that Skrillex went on and made growls from reese basses and acid basses. Scatta is a good example of the reese bass growls. In the track you can even hear straight up reese basses which he probably just converted to growls. First of The year is a good example of the acid based growls. These are clicky and have a lot of vibration feel to them.
I think that his new and improved stuff like All is Fair in Love and Brostep has a completely different style that is made from the squarified / phasey sounding bass thing that is going on right now. I have no idea what to call these things but Labco made a pretty good tutorial on how they are made. LINK
So how the f*** does he get all of these various sounds into a growl? I was really stuck on making growl basses because I was always trying to make these yoie patches thinking that the vowel movement started in the patch and came from tons of wavetable and FM automations. I guess that it can but for his Scatta / FOTY growls this seems waaaaay wrong. Check out my recreation of the First of the Year growl. LINK
I shit myself because the patches are a complete joke…they are a static patches with no automations. The vowel movement is coming 100% from the FX chain. Also, the synth doesn’t matter. What you hear in that clip is First of the Year, my FM8 patch, then a Massive patch, and then a Serum patch all with the same FX chain. The Serum patch sounds pretty close and I made that with about 2 min of effort.
Look how ridiculous the Serum patch is.
Two acid wavetables and then some distortion to beef the sound. No automation.
Right…so this is where I get secretive so sorry guys!!! This should put you on a good track to sorting out growl basses. If you check out my SMANS tutorial it is basically a prototype of my FX chain that I am using LINK. The biggest change that I made was making new EQ filters and automating them to generate the vowel sounds. I try to automate any FX parameter that has coloration and then always add OTT, distortion, and a phaser.
Happy growling! 