I don’t particularly care for dubstep but am more into traditional EDM, trance, electro-house. Basically, anything using simple or modified four-to-the-floor styles with heavy synth work. (Deadmau5, Rabbit in the Moon, Tiesto, etc, etc…)
Recently, I have been playing the game of “duplicate the sound” with my soft synths. I’ll hear a song in my car driving back from dropping the kid off at school in the morning and then spend an hour or so with my soft synths duplicating a sound with its effects before I start work.
Copying Rezz has been interesting though. Her “signature” bass sound is a saw with a hair of distortion with some really cool (but still simple) LFO/filter work for rhythm. Add some traditional sidechain compression tied to a kick and most of the work is done. Where she excels is tying in lots of fx into the overall rhythm of the bass that seems to have lots of dubstep’esq influence.
That led me into (newer) dubstep with the drones, wobbles and all-around crunchy bass. Truth be told, it was an eye opener a few months ago when I discovered that most of the crazy “bass rhythm” sounds live above 500hz and that a basic sin wave below 500hz is all you really need for power.
My main issue is that I can’t quite duplicate traditional dubstep and/or even super-clean wobbles. (An example here at 1:44: https://youtu.be/CNiLnw1t0UU)
I have figured out that (especially in the example above) that most of the sound is just lots of low and high pass filter work, probably tied to what I know as an “automation” in FL Studio. (I don’t know if that is a general term or if it’s FL Studio specific.) Hell, I was playing a couple synths tonight free-style and got super close to some of the key sounds, actually.
When I try and expand on that with, say, Skrillex type bass, I simply don’t even know where to start or what tools and techniques to use to distort and destroy the bass line into something like dubstep.
I guess, after all of that, if you wanted to make some really crunchy bass lines, what techniques would you use?
Yeah, I can understand how some people just wouldn’t like Skrillex. Chaos is kinda the point and groove is probably not on the list of description words I would use for it. Alas, it’s actually not my thing either. On occasion it is, but not always.
FM stuff is weird at first. Depending on your tool, just start with small changes as you build up a waveform, dust off your knowledge of harmonics theory and dig in. It took a day for me to make some noise that didn’t sound like a knife scraping over a sheet of metal, and two more days of tinkering to make something cool. It’ll probably take another month before I can design something more complex, like a cymbal. It’s technically additive synthesis, but it’s not actually? I dunno.