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?
I recently watched a documentary on the history of the original UK dubstep and how it transitioned into the more commercialized brostep. It did a good job of pointing out a lot of a absolutely distain for the newer genre brostep, actually. Hence, I really tried to focus my questions on the technical side of things and avoid anything that would even resemble Skrillex-worship. When it comes to raw sound design, there is still a ton of interesting nuggets in both styles that are super interesting to learn.
Definitely! There are a couple of brostep tracks that I really like, you can create some really nice grooves with that midrange modulation and I do generally like gnarly synths. Haven’t really gotten around to trying my hand at that myself, though …
And the disdain is real, the vibes of classic dubstep and brostep are just too different and it’s pretty annoying to have the name of your genre usurped like that. There have been attempts to make up qualifiers to specify the classic sound (e.g. “deep dubstep”), but they haven’t really caught on, either.