Guys I really need your help with this bassline

[davaughn]

Hey y'all-

I've been producing popEDM for ~6months and my songs are coming together but they're not quite as driving as what you hear on the radio. One thing that's missing for me are really driving basslines. I LOVE the diving bassline in Calvin Harris's "I need your love" in the chorus, but I have just failed to replicate it with Massive/Sylenth/Nexus.

I THINK it's something to do with a long portamento, but I can't get it right, and none of the bassline presets seem to come even close to sound as "full" as his does. Guessing he uses a sub and a higher one for that. Can y'all recommend any specific presets, techniques, download packs to accomplish that? I can do basic fiddling with the synths, but I'm not good enough yet to make them from scratch, and hoping one doesn't need to but can work off a preset.

Thanks!!!!
-D

[AaronYeo]

Listening to it as I type, sounds pretty straightforward.

One of the first things I notice off the bat is that the accompanying kick drum adds a lot of punch to the bass synth, which either has a rather slow attack, or more likely, is being pumped (aka sidechained compressed from the kick).

The portamento doesn't really have much to do with it, rather it's a pitch bend technique. Portamento is (usually) globally applied, meaning it affects every note played, whereas this is just a simple lowering of the pitch at the end of certain notes. You can use the clip envelopes to get the same affect by adjusting the pitch bend downwards for specific notes, near the end. It takes a ton of experimenting on how far down/how long to do it. Ableton is a little (read:very) finicky with fine adjustment especially on pitch bend, so REMEMBER to set two points on the line first, so that you can be sure it returns to 0 when you're done bending. I'm simplifying things out of laziness, if you get it great, if not I can explain more.

As for the timbre, it sounds pretty simple: Try stacking a couple of oscillators, one sawtooth and one sine, the sine playing an octave below. The 'crackly' sound you hear, especially when it bends down, is a result of dipping into sub-20hz frequencies with the sawtooth wave, when it gets to the point of hearing the individual croaks instead of a note. Kind of like when your throat is sore/dry and you croak little crackles, and if you do enough quickly enough you get a buzzy sound, but you can slow them down to the point of individual clicks...

I'm gonna jump into Operator and see if I can replicate the sound, brb.

[davaughn]

That is such a fantastic explanation - yes I totally get it. I haven't been able to glean that information elsewhere- I'll jump on Operator right now and give it a shot. If you're able to come up with something, I would love to see your preset and compare

[AaronYeo]

I'm pretty close, but it's almost time to leave work.... but I found a saturator set to waveshaper helps with the grit. There's also a slight filter envelope I didn't realize the first time, a typical "ow" sound (high-to-low cutoff) that adds a bit to the punchiness. I'll upload what I have in a bit.

edit: err I guess you can't upload stuff here. PM me your e-mail and i'll forward it that way.

[davaughn]

Hey Aaron-

I'm not really understanding the forum; I sent you a PM, it says it's sent but it's also still in the outbox. My email is [email protected]