Making disparate bass parts sit together

[bilsner]

ok so I have say 4 or so bass sounds I am tyeing together into a single bassline, but thru all the weird ass tweaking I've done to them (all in massive BTW) they have come out hitting pretty disparate frequency ranges and I need them to sit together.

I just went thru the gain structure thread and set the gains for everything from scratch, this helped somewhat as making each bass part hit the same db level revealed quite a lot about what was different between them. However I want to know should I be trying to EQ then as close a possible before i bounce them down to audio and freq split to manage the sub parts etc etc or do I just bring them closer once split ?

[paravrais]

Too many cooks can spoil the broth...or something along those lines. If you have 4 different massives running at the same time playing the same notes with different waveforms etc in each of the oscillators it's probably gonna sound horrible, thats like 12 different oscillations all fighting for prominence with different, conflicting sounds. try making one instance of massive, making it as filthy as possible and then resampling it. If you layer up the same waveforms in the same way with different eqs and effects they will sit together much more nicely.

[bilsner]

He he not making myself clear as usual, I mean that there are 4 different massive variations that I SWITCH between not play together

[paravrais]

He he not making myself clear as usual, I mean that there are 4 different massive variations that I SWITCH between not play together

LOL I get ya now, can't say i've ever really had that problem as such, just make sure they are all eq'd into a similar space in the mix??

[bilsner]

He he not making myself clear as usual, I mean that there are 4 different massive variations that I SWITCH between not play together

LOL I get ya now, can't say i've ever really had that problem as such, just make sure they are all eq'd into a similar space in the mix??

Yeah they are getting there, just wondered how close to each other I should get before splitting them into sub mid top.. I was erring on the side of getting it right before splitting.

[SunkLo]

Well if you send them all the same split buss then they will all receive the same treatment, which will make them fit together better. After you set the processing on the split busses you can go back and tweak each bass sound's settings to get them where you want.

[Basic A]

Lil bit of reverb goes a long way on midrange basses. Try putting them all in the same room.

Subtle coloring plugins (compressors / warmers / overdrives on subtle settings) can help a world too.

If they have such drastically different sound, then equing them can do just as much harm then good. YOu might be better to use a chart like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_key_frequencies

this one to tune each after you have applied effects/modulations/ect. WIth the midrange and distortion trends shaping up in dubstep alot of people dont realize how much they can change the tone of n instrument with a bit of distort, and therefor the final note is technically ddifferent then your midi keyboard key. therefore your music theory can look right, and you can still be jumping sour notes every other key.

[meer]

Err, crazy effects like chorus n pitchshifting etc will probably move two different noises a little out of tune, but definately not distortion. It will add and accentuate a crapload of harmonics, but the two synths will still play the same note.

I like to make one bass sound, clone it and tweak the clone into something new but still sort of the same.

[SunkLo]

Well it could over-accentuate the harmonics and filter out the fundamental such that a note has an undefined sounding root or that of one of its harmonics.

[Basic A]

Well it could over-accentuate the harmonics and filter out the fundamental such that a note has an undefined sounding root or that of one of its harmonics.

This.

Make a gritty yoy and through it through an analyzer, bet the bulk of its harmonic contents shifted, and bet youve got alot of oddities you werent expecting, all depends on how far you push though.

No matter either way I suppose, instrument tuning is perceptive anyway... but giving things a fine tuning after effects (specially anything reece based) has made all the difference for me before.

EDIT:::

And on the note... filtering is almost sure to cross the fundamental if we're talking about filtering in a creative aspect (lfos n shit, not touch ups for mix) ... tune begs to be reconsidered at that point.

[Sharmaji]

buss compression of the VCA variety

[meer]

Well it could over-accentuate the harmonics and filter out the fundamental such that a note has an undefined sounding root or that of one of its harmonics.

Our brains are very good at extrapolating the fundamental from the harmonics. Even if you open up your favourite additive synth (which you should) and only use harmonics above the fundamental, your brain will still recognize the fundamental by how far apart each harmonic is.

If you bandpass a random harmonic musically unrelated to the fundamental and then distort that to crap, yes, it will be out of tune. But we're talking about bass?

Crazy effects like audio-rangeish LFOs can have an effect on the pitch, but a casual filter envelope and some distortion won't.

[SunkLo]

Well it could over-accentuate the harmonics and filter out the fundamental such that a note has an undefined sounding root or that of one of its harmonics.

Our brains are very good at extrapolating the fundamental from the harmonics. Even if you open up your favourite additive synth (which you should) and only use harmonics above the fundamental, your brain will still recognize the fundamental by how far apart each harmonic is.

Ooh yes I know, this is a very interesting brain phenomena. I've played around with trying to make subsonic bass out of audible harmonics based around this idea. The waves MaxxBass style plugins revolve around this concept too. If distortion were severe enough though it could upset the balance enough to mess with your pitch perception. If enough harmonics were generated from the waveform's original harmonics it could begin to lose or shift tonality. Granted this would require a decently complex waveform and a decent amount of distortion but with current trends for both of these, I could see it happening.

[bilsner]

woah, this went way beyond my question, some v interesting stuff tho, good read.

[Anain]

I don't know if this was mentioned, but you might also conconsider not evening out your bass patches, and use them for dynamic. Since it sounds like they're different tones it might be cool to contrast them a bit. I know dubstep is bass driven music, but it can be cool to have a patch without sub bass, so when the next one hits it really fills up the track.