If you make bass heavy music, whether it’s dubstep, electro house, drum and bass, glitch hop or something else, you’ll probably want to check out this bass growl tutorial, or ‘monster bass tutorial’ – whatever you want to call it. In these two videos, you’ll discover how you can make these sounds in both Native Instruments FM8 and Massive, which give very different results.
Check them out and let me know what you think in the comments below – I’d love to know your feedback on these techniques and any other techniques you know to get similar cool sounds.
The video is no longer viewable.
You’ll see that at least 50% of the sound is attributed to the fx chain – if you can automate the EQ in certain ways to make your bass sound like it’s pronouncing certain vowels, then sweep up and down the frequency spectrum with some overdrive or tube amp at the same frequencies that are accentuated by the EQ unit, you’ll get a lot more movement and monster-like results.
Adding saturation is always a good thing to do on big dirty bass sounds.
As you can see, what you do inside the synth only gets you so far. The processing that you do after the synth in the FX chain has a huge impact on the character of the sound.
To show this content you have to accept our cookies.
When you make the synth patch, you have to imagine how you’ll be able to change it using processing and effects later on. This only comes with experience and practice of course, but it is essential that you get a good sound inside the synth from the start.
A lot of people go overboard with too many oscillators and end up blurring the sound too much before applying any EQ automation, distortion and other effects to it in the signal chain. Be careful that you don’t do that! Always aim to get a clear, well defined sound inside the synth first.
The video is no longer viewable.
Leave a quick comment below – I’d love to know which of these two synths makes for a better growl in your opinion – Massive or FM8?
If you’ve had any success at creating growl basses / monster basses using different techniques to these, or adapting these techniques further, please let me know in the comments below!
To show this content you have to accept our cookies.
To show this content you have to accept our cookies.
Hey! Thanks for all the awesome instructional tutorials, I’m learning a lot about my software & how to use it to the best of my ability.
I do have a question though… I was following along with the “Monster Bass / growl bass tutorial Pt 2” and I followed all the instructions exactly, and my bass DOES sound almost exactly the same as yours. At least until I add the saturator ( specifically on anything higher than 4-5 db of gain ), it starts to get a really unpleasant screechy white-noise type sound. And loses it’s bassy quaity, and just sounds horrid. I’ve also noticed that my bass sounds good & just like the one in the video when I’m on 1 voice, but if I do 2, or 3 (god, 3 is bad…) I get horrible feedback-type noise, that again, wrecks the bass entirely.
I’ve gone back and made sure all the settings in massive are the same, and they are. That the EQ’s are doing the SAME sweeps, which they are. And that the settings on the post-processing FX are the same too, and sure enough, they too are just like the video.
But if I do 3 voices or Above 6db of gain on “Sinoid fold”, the sound gets completely wrecked.
Please help me regulate this, I’m totally at a loss with this, and I want to achieve the same bass as demonstrated in the video.
Thanks in advance, Hope you can help 🙂
Sincerely,
Chris “Fawkz” Coffin
Hey dude, thanks! This is strange. The only thing I can think of is that your version of either Massive or Ableton Live might be different to mine. One thing I would recommend you to try (and if you’ve already done this then let me know) is to try making the sound inside the Ableton Live project file that you downloaded from me. Are you using Live 9? Mine is 9.0.6 I believe. Also, double check every setting in each plugin. Hope this helps…
FM8 clear