Punch, low end, and sub bass sound design exercise
You should have your Unison activated in Poly Config and Voice 1 and 2 checked !
Now we’ll learn how to make an 808 Bass / 808 Sub Bass and it will be a fun exercise that you will remember for a long time. There’s more than one way to achieve this and the more you practice this technique along with other pieces of musical knowledge you pick up. This sound is one of my favorite sounds to make and also play! It’s also a widely adopted sound in Hip Hop and Trap Music. Prepare yourself to build a very loud and punchy bass tutorial.
This is a Template here delivered as a start point for any sound-design based on its characteristics. For those who don’t want to follow this you can download the patch here.
Oscillator 1 settings
1/ Now that you are a pro with the Sub Layer trick by using the TRIANGLE filtered to get that Sinewave you should start with -24, level at max !
Oscillator 2 settings
2/ Then as you can see LEVEL here is at 0, but we set this Oscillator and when we finish the sound we can come back to this setting. When we revisit OSC 2 we will try to slightly bring up the level. Once you are comfortable with programming the 808 sub bass you should be able to find you own waveforms and adjust the tone. Thinking ahead this is a way to introduce a bit of grit in this 808 Sub. Generally this sound is clean so if we make it dirty it’s something else but anyways you may like using it for your music projects.
Oscillators options
To make things simple here we can give life to this 808 Sub by using the simple control BEND and SLI. This is because what we are looking for here is BEND = +63 and SLI to 44 . We also want OSC RETRIG here so set TRG = ON
Filters settings
Remember the ladder filter can remove odd harmonics and shape our sounds to be “Subby” and very Low. We add a little bit of Envelope Depth here to +16… Multimode filter will boost the Bass Frequencies if it was a BASS the Cutoff would be around 30-50 as it’s more a 808 Sub style we are a bit lower at 18.25 and the Envelope Depth +13
Amp Envelope settings
Here we sclupt the sound to its nature, or the nature we want it to be. We are aiming to make it with a good amount of sustain and a little bit of release to be able to Play a Bass Line.
Filter Envelope
We adjust this one as we want the filter envelope to react in time, for each note we play. This is the principle of the envelop. We want to use another model for the shape, shape number 7.
What can we do next ?
- As i said now you can try to mixing waveforms from OSC2 and bring harmonics to make a more noisy or gritty 808 Sub… Maybe you can add a little bit of Overdrive too…
- We can also make an introduction in the Amplitude Modulation as we prepare our OSC2 on a Square Waveforms. Go in Oscillators options (Click the knob twice on OSC2) activate AM1 because OSC2 Square will modulate OSC1. Now play a key and understand how OSC1 Timbre can get Altered by firstly TUN parameter, FIN & DET… And Also PW, SPD, PWM and LEVEL… Experiment, don’t try to go further with that as I will come back to Amplitude Modulation in later lesson. You should save few patches from this tutorial and keep playing to get familiar with the overall tone. Congratulations … I hope you find some great AM Bass here as well.
