What is wrong with my Sub Bass?

[charliefoy]

ESX24 standard patch, overdrive distortion to max, low pass. Ooooo shit.

[decklyn]

There are 2 things you need to do to make subs that will rattle your chest:

1) The sub bass should be free of harmonics. A woofer will vibrate easily with a pure sine. Anything else (distortion on the sine) will actually reduce the ability of a speaker to reproduce the signal. You layer things over top of the sub to make it more audible on systems that can't produce sub-bass such as earbuds. This is not a hard fast rule but if you want that bass that makes you go "wow" in the club, then pure sines are the first step.

2) You need to position the bass in the mix correctly. You need your bass to be LOUD and not cause clipping with other elements. I like to hp everything in the mix and still duck the sub under the kick to make the kick sound more impactful although it will likely have its meat quite higher. Any higher frequency layer that you make (even if it is your sub distorted and processed) should not contain any frequency found in the pure sub which will show up as a thin slit in a frequency analyzer as there are no harmonics.

It's not that difficult - you just have to get on to it then all your tracks will have the sub bass you want leaving you free to also work on the audible bass frequencies (if your target audience won't only be listening on club systems).

Operator in ableton will produce a good sub bass with the default patch.

[yamaz]

Anyone help me figure this sub bass patch out? The best I can get is with massive using a sine wave + triangle 1 octave above, and low pass it with ableton's eq8

[hifi]

there is so much wrong in your post.

There is? I'll guarantee that many pro tracks have additional harmonic content on their basslines above a pure sine.

I figured out the best way for me was to add some frequency modulation using Massive's Modulation OSC. It added just the right amount of harmonics to the bass to make the sound more full and shine through on systems that couldn't hit the 30-40hz fundamental properly.

I find it funny how some people on here will hear one way to do things and think that it is gospel, and even go so far as to deride others.

nooooo. no harmonics just a simple sine wave little attack little release and the decay at 0. will sound perfectly fine not really necessary to add harmonics since all you need the sub at clubs is to make your chestplate shake.

[mmjdw]

On reso's hemisphere you have some filtered noise along with the sub... helps give presence to the sub without being immediately obvious