Ableton Forum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW0yDXodp4Q

Above is a link to a track with the reese bass in it i've been attempting to make for ages. It's really hard to describe it and to be honest i'm unsure if it even is a reese bass. I tried detuning oscillators in fm8 and operator to get a beating effect. Which is what I thought was what was adding that mad twisting squelchyness to the sound. Any ideas? My ears aren't well trained enough to decipher whats going on here. Any help much appreciated as always.

First thing I said to myself after reading your message was "What the hell is a reese bass?"...

A quick Google brings up loads of results that not only explain what a "Reese bass" sound is, but also detail how it's made.

102455 wrote:First thing I said to myself after reading your message was "What the hell is a reese bass?"...

A quick Google brings up loads of results that not only explain what a "Reese bass" sound is, but also detail how it's made.

I know how to make reese basses. I've been working on making them at least two years now. This isn't just your standard reese bass.

Try looking up sound design for "Jacobs ladders" and electricity sound effects. This kind of high frequency distorted reese is very similar to "electricity" noise based sounds.

MajikDragon89 wrote:I know how to make reese basses.

Oh well I do apologise. I was merely responding to what you had written.

You repeatedly used the term "reese bass" and your post title asked how it was made. My fault entirely, I'm sure.

You're excused.

http://youtu.be/jHFzfZl6NQQ

Figure out how to replicate that.

I'm sure I could try doing it with Live fx, but I just woke up

Also towards the end, the track has almost a vocoder quality to it.

Google: Neurofunk Bass
you will get much more specific info than just looking into "Reese"
Just detuning oscillators against one another will only give you the beating, fuzzy aspect of the sound. From there the trick is making the most harmonically rich, overdriven dirty sound you can (using multiband splitting/distortion, vocoding, phasing, flangers, chorus, etc), and then heavily filtering it, preferably with a "morphing" filter, but band-pass, comb, and notch filters help too. Oftentimes you'll want to layer up this process, adding in more texture with further distortions, followed by filtering. As long as you keep it subtle at each step, you can make long chains like this that will exhibit loads of internal movement, but yeah, it's not a simple matter of detuning some oscillators, or adding a specific effect, these sorts of bass sounds are made from loads of processing, and often re-sampling.