Engineering a low, liquid bass?

Re: Engineering a low, liquid bass?

There are very few good massive tutorials out there.

I wouldn't really call the basslines in either of those tracks "liquid." When you say liquid I think of liquid dnb sub(sine) basses with maybe a square wave and some LFO's.

http://soundcloud.com/nmilla/bass-design-3-2 <-- That's about as close as I get to heavy dubstep basses. However, I'm pretty alright at cloning a sound (usually).

The thing I've noticed that a lot of people do when they use massive is over do it. Massive gives you a LOT of things to play around with, but that doesn't mean you need to use everything, or if you do, just make subtle changes. Also, people try and get exact sounds out of JUST massive, before they put an EQ on it and before they put effects on it. Massive can only get you so far, the rest comes with effects.

Another thing I do when I want one of my basses to sound less "hard," is I'll throw a reverb ABOVE the compressor on the bass's mixer channel, and turn the cuts off and turn the dry off, turn the decay down to .1 and mess around with the diffusion and room size, it gives the bassline a very cool effect.

Re: Engineering a low, liquid bass?

I'll give it a try! I messed around with a bassline yesterday and got pretty close to the sound I wanted, I just had a really harsh but subtle white noise layered over it which I couldn't really remove. If I EQed it out, I lost some of the thickness to the bass.

And about calling it liquid, I only do so because I have literally no idea WHAT to call it. Rofl. It sounds more slimy than harsh.

I guess my biggest problem with massive is that I don't know much of the waveshapes -- only the ones that are most common. (Square, sine, saw,) So I don't know where to begin when attempting to design a sound. I should probably just spend a few days playing with all of the combinations, finding out what is what.