Ableton Forum

Im aware that theres is a hip hop sub bass preset in ableton . I ve been using that and throwing on a saturator to make the the bass sound even fatter. Does anyone know how to make a sub bass using like operator or something? please and thank you.

Sine wavs.

+1,

standard (as they say...)

I also use this little free-bee VST now and then,,,

http://www.spacenoah.com/audio/2008/02/ ... r-windows/

Sine or triangles make's a nice sub!
Another way is to use corpus.

Pretty simple, nearly all the tools will do it, it's just a single osc w/ a sin wave. You can fatten it up by adding another osc and playing around w/ the waveforms.

A filtered square wave will get you to the sound you want more quickly imo. To my experience, pure sine waves require a lot of processing to not take up the whole headroom.
Keep in mind that a lot of the sub bass you are hearing is actually in higher frequencie ranges than you might think. Saturation is your friend here to add overtones that make sub bass audible on smaller speakers.

Operator is easy to dial in sub bass... I usually put a bit of a pitch envelope for some punch and either decay or release so that it fades out how i want.

Pure Sine Waves. Medium attack . Thats it!!!! Any synth will do! : )

tip: split the frequencies and add subtle filter/saturation, compression and mono the low-end.

Also, EQ your low, mid and high differently to accentuate the best parts of each.

a sine wav will move more air through a large system than a square wave (the slow increase in power will overcome the inertia of the air better than the sharp transition of the square wave. So take a mono sine wave, lowpass it down to just the subbass range, and use that to layer over every other bass you make. Gives it the oomph, then you can use the square waves to add character to the higher frequencies.

Uhm, I think lowpass-filtering a sine wave will do exactly nothing to the sound if you are using a transparent filter, as sine waves don't have any harmonics. If you filter a square wave on the other hand, you're getting a waveform similar to the sine wave, except there are some harmonics. There will be no "sharp transition", which would occur on an unfiltered square wave.

2be wrote:Uhm, I think lowpass-filtering a sine wave will do exactly nothing to the sound if you are using a transparent filter, as sine waves don't have any harmonics. If you filter a square wave on the other hand, you're getting a waveform similar to the sine wave, except there are some harmonics. There will be no "sharp transition", which would occur on an unfiltered square wave.

I'd argue that you don't really need harmonics on a sub tone, but to each his own.

Yeah, I agree. Sub bass is perfectly audible on good systems without harmonics.
But on smaller systems without a good low end, it's nearly unhearable.
Some higher frequencie content will make it audible on pretty much every system (even if it technically isn't 'sub' anymore).

2be wrote:Yeah, I agree. Sub bass is perfectly audible on good systems without harmonics.
But on smaller systems without a good low end, it's nearly unhearable.
Some higher frequencie content will make it audible on pretty much every system (even if it technically isn't 'sub' anymore).

If you're talking about a straight sub sound like a hip hop bass sound, then yes, you are correct and those harmonics are useful. However, if you're talking about a bass sound where you need to add in a sub bass because the bass you have isn't deep enough then those harmonics are not necessary, and in fact could muddy up the rest of the bass sound.

exactly. We're talking about layering sub-bass to an existing bassline. You'll still need to have an instrument layer (or two) which delivers in the bass and mid and upper frequencies, but when it comes to subbass, all you need is a strong subbass. Harmonics are just going to muddy it.