The Official Growl Bass Thread

[Autism]

make a copy of the growl bass, low pass it, then distort, saturate, and compress the hell out of that, then layer that on top of the original, instant fatness&fullness and harmonics

Shall i do this with a send track or just a copy? anyhow, going to try this when i get home!

[narrator]

Here's our latest remix / release type thing. There are some growls in there at the beginning of the drop, if anyone is interested I can talk through my process. Not perfect and if I were to do them again I'd work more on bringing out the lower mids.

Soundcloud

I'M INTERESTED AS FUCK

Same here, that's one helluva nice sound you got right there.

[Eskimo]

Not if used like this. This will never get old/overdone.

that sounds awesome and all, but the effect can be recreated very easily with a vocoder for the color and controlling the pitch via midi with autotune

Would be pretty awesome combined with a nasty growl sound though

[OfficialDAPT]

hahaha that talk box is awesome!

[shim]

Here's our latest remix / release type thing. There are some growls in there at the beginning of the drop, if anyone is interested I can talk through my process. Not perfect and if I were to do them again I'd work more on bringing out the lower mids.

Soundcloud

yea i also would be psyched to know your method. you also got a new subscriber. remix is sick.

[mthrfnk]

The growly bits in this xKore song sound pretty good



Would be interested in knowing how to recreate them.

[MassAphekt]

Here's our latest remix / release type thing. There are some growls in there at the beginning of the drop, if anyone is interested I can talk through my process. Not perfect and if I were to do them again I'd work more on bringing out the lower mids.

Soundcloud

im interested in hearing the process thats a serious tune

[Ghostie]

I can't believe everyone is calling me an asshole. I'm not asking for nor do I want people to say "omg your the best" but my bass sound is undeniably in another league from anything made on this forum.

Its not that i'm arrogant either. I jsut know how much work i put into sound design and am not impressed when I hear a distorted square wave with some filtering. I admit that my technique has a lot of rough edges that I need to sort out.. But at the same time you can hear how its very similar to skrillex, koan sound, feed me.. you can hear the wishy, chorusy, suctioness of the modulation. I'm not saying its perfect but I damn sure working my ass off to even comprehend sound design a little. But then all I get is "aw its weak.. etc.."" Its just a lack of respect/

I want to share what I know. but my methods are kinda random now,

-sometimes I run fm8 through a vocoder and get some good sounds by automating the formant knob.

-sometimes I get good results by running literally 3-4 camelphats and 3-4 wow filters in series all assigned to one macro and then tweak the "min/max" parameters until it yields something interesting that isn't resonating like all hell

-sometimes i add chorus phaser and flangers and tweek various parameters in automation until it starts to give the sound a noticeable character

-sometimes I add multiple layers of distortion and even automate the gain or color so the dist works with the ffilters

- sometimes I use like 8 fucking L2's a handful of maxbasses, a dozen eqz, 10 amps, 2 vocoders, countless multiband compressors, and fm8





and none of the stuff i posted had sub bass in them nor were they something i spent more than an hour on

Your so called "growl bass" is definitely not "undeniably in another league from anything made on this forum". It is actually quite weak. Just sayin.

[hookey]

Now that you guys have experienced by yourself how hard it is to make this sound decent... don't you think it's a bit dodgy to think Skrillex did Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites on a laptop with some blown up speaker (so basically in mono?) connected to the headphone jack?

Anyway, for this particular song I dont think he used Talkwah to modulate the vowels. It sounds TERRIBLE. Destroys the sound harmonics and weight, puts a very annoying resonance on it. WOW Filter seems better but still pretty bad, it's too obvious when someone uses it, you can spot all these resonances happening. So what the fuck did Skrillex use for the SMANS growl to modulate it in a way that sounds like vowels talking yet not get any of these artifacts?

I've heard he modulated the EQ8 manually, but I don't use Ableton so I can't say. Is there any good equalizer with vowel presets? Looking them in a chart and doing it all yourself sounds like a pain in the ass.

Anyone can tell me all the freqs and Q's from used in the formant presets on EQ8? I'll try to get these on my equalizer and play arround with it.

Also, im not sure about resampling. I think most of the sound is FM8. The effects on FM8 are pretty bad tho.
Ohmicide for distortion i've tried, and I always end up with overdistorted crap.

[hasezwei]

bandreject filters before distortion (like massive's sine and parabolic shaper), loadsa EQ afterwards, multiband process that.
its definetly possible.

but feed me did it, not skrilly

[Hostile Invasion]

Now that you guys have experienced by yourself how hard it is to make this sound decent... don't you think it's a bit dodgy to think Skrillex did Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites on a laptop with some blown up speaker (so basically in mono?) connected to the headphone jack?

Anyway, for this particular song I dont think he used Talkwah to modulate the vowels. It sounds TERRIBLE. Destroys the sound harmonics and weight, puts a very annoying resonance on it. WOW Filter seems better but still pretty bad, it's too obvious when someone uses it, you can spot all these resonances happening. So what the fuck did Skrillex use for the SMANS growl to modulate it in a way that sounds like vowels talking yet not get any of these artifacts?

I've heard he modulated the EQ8 manually, but I don't use Ableton so I can't say. Is there any good equalizer with vowel presets? Looking them in a chart and doing it all yourself sounds like a pain in the ass.

Anyone can tell me all the freqs and Q's from used in the formant presets on EQ8? I'll try to get these on my equalizer and play arround with it.

Also, im not sure about resampling. I think most of the sound is FM8. The effects on FM8 are pretty bad tho.
Ohmicide for distortion i've tried, and I always end up with overdistorted crap.

No. Just because a lot of people can't get it to sound good doesn't mean that Skrillex somehow "cheated" to get his sound. He was trying to make a Noisia bass. Probably said "fuck the rules" and worked his ass off creating and experimenting.

[twilitez]

It is most definitely possible to get a sick growl out of a single synth, it may require 2 busses of fx (fruity has a limit of 8 on one).
But it is doable.

[The Riot Act]

Gentle speech and 2 saws. Bandreject and highpass2 in series. Sine shaper and parabolic shaper. Modulate all the waveforms and the filter. Envelope the highpass to go off in the tip. Adds more growl. Modulate the eq and just experiment. Its really just messing with filters and eq and seeing how the distortions work together. All my songs in my sig are pure massive

Are you able to post a few screen shots or even the patch? It's been over 3 hours and I am nowhere close to that sound

[mromgwtf]

Soundcloud

Done in massive.

Edit: no processing! (just like girls say, "no make up!" )

[The Riot Act]

Is frequency splitting and processing the bands differently a big thing in these sounds or am I just thinking too deep?

[jrisreal]

It depends. I don't frequency split...ever. But I imagine that some of the growls involve heavy use of layering...which is like freq-split's older cousin hehe. So I guess freq splitting could help. Especially if you're modulating some bands differently or something. I could imagine freq-modulation in the 4kHz+ area could be useful in making a growl sound.

[RandoRando]

Now that you guys have experienced by yourself how hard it is to make this sound decent... don't you think it's a bit dodgy to think Skrillex did Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites on a laptop with some blown up speaker (so basically in mono?) connected to the headphone jack?

Anyway, for this particular song I dont think he used Talkwah to modulate the vowels. It sounds TERRIBLE. Destroys the sound harmonics and weight, puts a very annoying resonance on it. WOW Filter seems better but still pretty bad, it's too obvious when someone uses it, you can spot all these resonances happening. So what the fuck did Skrillex use for the SMANS growl to modulate it in a way that sounds like vowels talking yet not get any of these artifacts?

I've heard he modulated the EQ8 manually, but I don't use Ableton so I can't say. Is there any good equalizer with vowel presets? Looking them in a chart and doing it all yourself sounds like a pain in the ass.

Anyone can tell me all the freqs and Q's from used in the formant presets on EQ8? I'll try to get these on my equalizer and play arround with it.

Also, im not sure about resampling. I think most of the sound is FM8. The effects on FM8 are pretty bad tho.
Ohmicide for distortion i've tried, and I always end up with overdistorted crap.

the formany presets for EQ8 wouldnt yield his results, they sound weird, that sound will always remain a mystery.
this was the first sign ever of this song, who knows how the fuck he made that sound on a blown speaker (ive seen that same interview) this one sounds a little different too

[jrisreal]

maybe he just recorded the output of the blown speaker while listening to Rebecca Black - Friday.

[jrisreal]

make a copy of the growl bass, low pass it, then distort, saturate, and compress the hell out of that, then layer that on top of the original, instant fatness&fullness and harmonics

Shall i do this with a send track or just a copy? anyhow, going to try this when i get home!

Don't see a difference. Using a send may use more CPU but that's about it.

[Xend54]

Soundcloud
This is made with operator with a little saturation.

Just let me know if you are interested in a tutorial!