What do you treat your wobble with?

[invictus]

I just wanted to ask you guys like when you have your wobbles or midrange bass done in massive or any other vst and then it's time to add some plugins to make it thicker or more alive. What do you use for that?

[Killamike49]

Chorus, reverb, slight delay (7-15ms is good for robo basses), phasers, filters on sends, duping, bitcrushing, distorting, compressing, convolving. Pretty much everything and the kitchen sink man, haha.

[invictus]

kitchen sink? LOL what you mean ? ;D

[Killamike49]

Haha, samplers honestly. Once you get a little movement you're happy with alot of people stick their sound in a sampler, with A LOT of things automating at the same time over a long ass time (like 64 bars open to close), and they cut out interesting snippets to use later. Rinse and repeat till you have a bunch of cool versions of your wobble, then arrange them in an interesting manner. Reverse them and timestretch them too. That's one way to get some interesting basses.

[Atkinson]

I usually make the full midrange bass for a track in massive, export it to .wav, open a fresh FL Studio put the .wav in, EQ it, add reverb, delay, chorus, bitcrusher, sample and hold, stereo wideners, duplicating, phasing and basically chop bits up and arrange them and add filters and all sorts really, just experiment and see what sounds nice for you

[mitchAUS]

Love and respect


I can't remember a time where i didn't saturate and filter my midrange. I prefer a mellower sound so its always been about a lot of subtly for me. But yeah, those would be the two things i pretty much strap to any bass patch.

Ive been more experimental with my basses in recent times though. Amp modellers are a lot of fun. I spent 3 hours in guitar rig today with the same bass riff, fuck that program is fun. Splitting a signal and sending the left channel through a different amp and cab then the right does some crazy fun stuff to the stereo image. I just sat there and fiddled till i liked something then bounced it, then fiddled a different way and bounced it etc. Just throw anything on there and play until you find something you like and bounce it.

Ill also note that at this point i was just playing with a reece, no "wobble". lots of movement though. I wrote a riff that found its way in 4 separate octaves so as i fiddled i was finding some tones that worked well on the high notes and some on the dirty lower mids. Standard practice would be to then solo each of my creations and mute any parts that didn't sound good. Say i liked the screaming highs of one version but the effects muddied up the lower sequences to poop id just cut out the bit i liked and ditched the rest. After going through 30 odd versions of the sound i start to narrow it down to sounds that flow well into each other. then its a matter of copy and pasting, cutting and chopping, audio collage style until i get the movement and vibe in the riff I'm after. Then ill start looking at notch filter sweeps and automation to get it flowing together. Its usually only at this stage ill start looking at bringing in a filter to "wobble" stuff.

[mitchAUS]

One thing i want to add, take mental (or better still, physical) notes as you go. For instance: at one point i had a reverb in the signal chain before a chorus and it gave this mad spacial vibe to the riff in the upper octave that rang out beautifully...until the bass slid down into the lower register and my glistening verb turned to crap. Obviously if i just bounced this I wouldn't get the whole reverb tail of the highs, so i took a mental note that reverb -> chorus sounded good on that part of the riff so when i got to the audio collage stage i looked to my notes and on one of the channels that was just playing the higher notes i had a reverb -> chorus inserted.

Basically as you play with you sound actively listen and think carefully about how you can use the sounds you stumble upon.

[ehbes]

Scott's turf builder max

[_Agu_]

Haha, samplers honestly. Once you get a little movement you're happy with alot of people stick their sound in a sampler, with A LOT of things automating at the same time over a long ass time (like 64 bars open to close), and they cut out interesting snippets to use later. Rinse and repeat till you have a bunch of cool versions of your wobble, then arrange them in an interesting manner. Reverse them and timestretch them too. That's one way to get some interesting basses.

This.

[hysteriaa]

reverb, camelphat, ohmicide, camelcrusher, saturation, more that i cant think of atm.

[eldoogle]

Scott's turf builder max

This.

But seriously, I've used Abletons Saturator on drums and bass before. I've heard that it's better to use multiple saturators than one dialed heavily with drive, but I was wondering, should I turn on soft clipping? And how much do you guys usually turn up your saturation on your basses? Seems like theres a fine line between a lot of distortion and none at all (at least to me).

[mitchAUS]

This is one of those use your ears situations. I usually find myself using multiple instances with drive set to 20-40% but thats no hard rule, I've pushed sounds a lot harder and I've been more subtle then that. I use parallel distortion a fair bit two. Plugins like camelphat and saturn have a wet/dry or mix nob so you can easily set up parallel pricing with these. But sometimes its worth setting up a parallel channel so you can distort one chain then eq it before mixing it back with the dry signal.