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Approaching a Sub Bass patch

January 4, 2020 5 Min Read

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One thing I notice when I first got the Analog Four Mark One was I’m not able to build bass sounds quickly. Remembering myself from the old days when I designed bass on the Korg MS2000 it was easy to write a bass sound. This was because it was a digital virtual analog synth where we fortunately have a sine wave at our disposal. When I recall my sound design experience with that machine I felt this was why I can’t get my preferred sine wave bass sounds right on the A4.

I was so in Love with this MS2000R when I bought it…

Of course, if you love the sine wave an analog synth is not really a great choice. If you want the sine wave sound you should consider a digital/ Virtual Analog Synthesizer or an FM synth for that.

Just because we don’t have a sine wave in our selection of oscillators – we can’t make a bass sound similar to the sine wave bass. Then a couple of years later I read the modifications Elektron did with the Mark Two especially on the overdrive plus the separate outputs I bought the Analog Four again, but this time it was the Mark Two. I got used to the Mark Two changes and decided to challenge myself with a project : the so called LowEnd101.

Yes you read me well this project comes from a self challenge and it pushed me to find every tool in the Analog Four to make it a better bass synth sounds without external processing.

It’s important to note :
External processing changes a lot how much possibilities we have to make our bass sounds tighter, louder, punchier…

Don’t forget few things when you approach a sub bass patch

You should stay in Mono, the frequency range of a Sub Bass is 0Hz/60Hz more or less – It is very closed to a 808 kick drum fundamental (around 49,9Hz) and one octave higher we found the 909 kick drum (around 65,5Hz). This is why a Sub Bass sound plays better with the 909 kick more than the 808 kick (especially with no external processing or mixing tricks). In short the 808 kick is almost near sub bass territory and having a sub bass sound on another track will mud up the mix and you can’t separate the instruments in a mix well. When you hear the word mud in mixing and sound design it usually refers to two or more sounds getting mixed together without being able to hear separate instrument tracks.

The characteristics of your Sub Bass patch. Sometimes your patch will sound clean and be pure energy. Other times it will have a little bit of spice like overdrive included. If the sound will be played with a long sustain or short sustain (in one case or another – few tweaks should be applied) etc…

You should take how sound works by physics as an approach to Sub Bass patches too. How sound from physics works : Sound propagate through a medium (such as air, water and solids) – in our case Sound waves are generated by a sound source (headphones, monitors). The sound source creates vibrations in the surrounding medium (our ears, our rooms. We can exaggerate this phenomena by giving our Sub Bass more movement so the Sub Bass will be more felt and more heard similar to a vibrato. The destination of the modulation is not necessarily the volume like a traditional vibrato – as long as you feel-heard movement inside.

Note: If your sound is played short this trick will be not be useful in that scenario. In order to take advantage of this tutorial we will need sounds with longer sustained notes to notice the movement.

And last but not least the volume and the gain staging because of the filter and the nature of the Sub Bass you will probably have to push the volume higher. The more you filter things result in a drop in amplitude and it’s even more true with a triangle waveform. Of course on a sine wave there’s not so much to filter other than to attenuate the amplitude of the fundamental at some point you filter everything and it’s quiet every time you play a note.

To be able to make good decisions in this area, you need to hear it ! If you have a good set of monitors it’s very nice but for the 0 to 60Hz it’s generally the purpose of the Subwoofer… And when you have a subwoofer you need more than the others to have a treated and fixed dedicated room with bass trap etc… I think the Sub Pac is a good alternative to the Sub-Woofer if you do not have a treated room. I would also recommend a headphone amp to put your Analog Four outputs into. A headphone amp will let you hear more detail on the low end because of the amplification system even if your Analog Four is set to a lower volume.

Example Found on youtube

Catalano gives a good example although it’s not a pure and simple Sub Bass we’re in between a kick drum and a Sub Bass, that’s we call the 808 Bass but you’ll get key ingredient for this type of sound. It’s Sub Bass with more knock in the attack of the sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf82auUboe8

Useful for Sound Design and Mixing

Both extremely useful tools when designing sound is Oscilloscope and Spectrum. Why, for instance making the Triangle wave the most close to a Sinewave by filtering it. An Oscilloscope is very convenient. You can use a real hardware Oscilloscope if you have one, but there’s also good standalone software as well as AU-VST plugins.

Oscilloscope :

Spectrum / EQ (some with Multi-channel Analysis) :

Also if possible always Design through a LIMITER to protect your ears no reference here… if it’s for protection purpose…