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Hey Everyone,

It's crucial to get those upper harmonics of the sub bass so your bass will translate on to speakers that may not produce the incredibly low stuff. I was wondering how you go about adding harmonics to your sub bass. Do you guys use an overdrive plug in, or do you do it in the Synth your using? Or do you have a different method?

I used to do this, but then I stopped... just seems to take up a lot of space in the mix and muddy things up. I stick to pure sines now layered underneath mid range basses/leads

Yeah that was my concern with the other methods. Now would you use single sines, or would you add say a 30Hz sine, with the octave 60Hz above it for example?

Yes i do this. Any type of distortion/saturation works well. I really like filter drive in sylenth for this purpose. Or you could just use a saw or a square or any other waveform and highcut it so you only got like 2 or 3 harmonics poking through.

Maul VST is perfect for this (and a lot of other distortion techniques too). It's a multiband distortion unit so you can pump the lows of a kick/bassline through a tube distortion and then process the mids and highs however you like

I'll usually either layer a cello or something over the sub just an octave higher, or if you're using an fm synth, I'll have a sine modulate the original sine a little bit. Then I'll split the frequencies and add some distortion, excitement etc. to the mid-higher end of it.

i use tube saturation usually

or whatever its called

ferrics tds can be alright too

I'll have to try/check some of these out! Thanks Everyone. Who knows, there may be a beautiful combination between some of these.

Unfamiliar Identity wrote:Yeah that was my concern with the other methods. Now would you use single sines, or would you add say a 30Hz sine, with the octave 60Hz above it for example?

It would have to depend on the note... sometimes I will go an octave up or down depending on the frequency of a particular note... anything below a D I will usually just hit an octave up but anything above a D I will keep at the original octave

bennyfroobs wrote:or whatever its called

ferrics tds can be alright too

ferric tds is great but i've stopped using it in favour of the tesla se b2b pro and the THD modelling on the density compressor

the boot eq has a great sounding tube attachment too

Nebula 3 with preamp Drive cranked it's total warmness.

You can add a high-passed harmonics layer like this:

Loving all these suggestions!

there is an other thread, I'll just paste my response and thisissovereign's from there

ThisIsSovereign wrote:

"What you're hearing on the professional tracks is not the sub-bass but rather higher harmonics above the sub-bass added either by distortion/saturation or some other method. You can test what you're actually hearing by throwing the track into your DAW and putting an EQ on the channel, setting up a HP filter and moving it to see where the response seems to stop. But honestly there's no way to really make actual sub-bass frequencies audible on a laptop or a phone, the speakers are just way to small for that kind of response. If you want something portable for the laptop you gotta get a decent pair of headphones at the very least."


I wrote:
this, or if you wanna keep the full impact of undistorted sinewave based subbass just throw up a layer (or an other osc in snyth) playing an octave above, the same notes as the sub. if you have any (volume / pitch) automation on your sub its best to copy it, for it will give the fake feeling that its the sub you are hearing, coz it will follow its automation. ofc tweak the the layer to what fits your track the best.


and ofc, if you add an other layer with an other channel, hi pass it so it wont clash with your sub. if you add it in massive (or in any snyth were you can define the filter routing for the OSC-s) route it to a filter and hipass the OSC in the snyth for the same reason.

if you are doing it in massive watch out not to route (even partially) your sub to the same HP filter coz it will take away its power.
so it should be like this:

osc 1 (sine i guess) sub routed fully to filter one (you can use it later on, its not a must)
osc 2 (chose a waveform which suits your track the best) routed fully to filter two which is a hipass. and have this second layer quite low on volume coz remember you are not going for a midrange bass, but to add something which will make your sub audible

If you're using Ableton, you are literally SET with Operator and the Dynamic Tube effect. That's all you need.

With Operator, set the routing to be 4 horizontal (so none are modulating another) and have operator A be a full volume sine. Make operator B be like -20dB sine. Operator C maybe -26dB. Do whatever numbers sound best to you. Then throw on Dynamic Tube, turn the drive up to like +7, set it to mode C, and bring the Bias up maybe 30%. Adjust all these to taste, experiment. Anytime we want a warm sub instrument, that's our go-to rack.

note: might be wrong about the bias knob. we use it all the time, but I can't remember if we turn it up for subs. pretty sure that's what we usually do.

jonahmann wrote:You can add a high-passed harmonics layer like this:

I love doing that, you can perceive it without 'hearing' it

Google Voxengo Shinechilla. It's a plugin that enables you to select how much of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th harmonic saturation you want to mix into the original sound, really flexible for using with sub bass.

to add a bit of movement to the sub bass, I use a lowpassed PWM and modulate the pulse length. adds a nice warm moving sub without interfering with anything else. I think I got that tip of an Icicle CM video.

Also, instead of using a sine, how about a low passed square? even add an envelope to the low pass so you get the full square at the initial hit, then wobble the low pass a very subtle amount over time with the same envelope adding a bit more interest.

Or 3 saws, de tuned like a reece, then filtered (only de tuned a very little) then low passed, and then a limiter with a low threshold to keep the sub volume more constant.

then add maybe some saturation/distortion over the top if its not enough.

Dunno if this answers your question, but there are some interesting ways of creating sub bass without just using sine.

You could do this:
1. Sine wave, saturate to taste, lowpass, fiddle around til you got a nice warm sound.
2. Import back to your daw, highpass so you just have the harmonics left.
3. Layer it with a pure sine wave and adjust levels to taste. Now you got a mighty sine wave + some harmonics and it's not muddy at all like it can be if you saturate the whole thing.