Questions for Optical…

Exactly what I wanted to ask!

It started as a pretty obvious distorted full frequency synth sound from the Pro-One with lots of harmonics and sounding like a fairly standard distorted bass sound. We used to set a DAT tape on record and then play simple notes from the Pro-One live whilst hand modulating the filter cutoff at the same time so we would end up with all kinds of filter and pitch moves on the tape….mostly too crazy to use but some small snips would be really cool or with great movement and shape and timing and pitch bending etc.

We would then sample into the EMU the best snips from the DAT…sometimes we just used one from the whole DAT recording, sometimes we used a 3 or 4 to piece a riff together. Once in the EMU we then added another layer of filtering driven by ENV’s LFO’s and the Modwheel and tried to accentuate the characteristics of the initial sample from the Pro-One.

Basically the simple principles are that heavy distortion adds lots of upper harmonics to any simple bass sounds (like the way the old reece house bass turned into a hugely gnarly dnb bass through years of distorting and sampling and filtering by many different artists)

Watermelon bass was a technique I learned through a lot of experimentation over the years. I took a distorted fat sound and filtered it way down to just a sub type bass sound and made the bass melody as a kind of dub reggae bass sound. Then when I had the fat simple bass sound with a cool part I then added an ENV to the cut off of the bass sound but instead of making the filter cutoff go all the way up to the top I just let it go up to the 3rd harmonic like around 400-600 hz…so it just adding a pretty non aggressive shape that just gives some rhythm but not growling at all….kind of warm and soft again at that point but with that wiggle you hear in the final bassline.

From there I took the still dub reggae sounding bass sound out of the sampler into the focusrite green eq which had an Input and Output gain plus 4 band EQ….all sections could be overdriven to get all kinds of distortion and saturation with the ability to tune it all with the eq bands so to me it was the ultimate saturation and distortion unit…it broke up in a really nice way and always kept the bass end very fat. So the final result was that bass…..it went from nasty to nice and then somewhere inbetween for the end result.

I usually make a bunch of sample patches of various things I have come across, hopefully with lots of variety. Some single sample like strings and anything I want to play as an instrument I set up with all the controls I talked about in my tutorial. I also chuck in a load of random noises and weird stuff to play with.

Then I get a simple beat Rhythm to work over and I go ahead and make lots of parts and try out ideas until I find something I definitely like to begin. Then its process of making lots of parts from all the things you have collected.

From there you need to experiment whilst you still have just a bunch of 8 – 16 bar loops on what parts work together and which ones don’t and whether its all in key and one thing is not covering up another etc.

Only one you have all the parts working perfectly is the time to start arranging everything and you should have a good grip on which parts are the peak and which are the intro and which are parts you can bring in for interest and development of the journey.

Once you have the rough arrangement done you can go back and add the finishing touches and some extra modulation and effects to really make it great

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I think you can hear that to make the Worm in The Host sound pretty close to the way it would have sounded in analog world kind of relies on the mix not having shiny tops like a modern mix…that was from every channel in the whole track being saturated and crushed and with a roll off on the highest frequencies and the very lowest to keep it crunchy in the mids.

Most of the drum and bass distortion comes from Camel Phat plus I’m using my original break samples. I found that with some Camel Phat followed by Sonnox Limiter with the default settings and 25% Enhance Slider gave me that balance between old crunch and modern level plus the Sonnox Enhance has a magical way of curing lack of top end and makes a beat sound really solid and punchy and level compared to 99% of limiters. The downside is it can suck up the fundamental from a bass sound so I use it on drums mostly and then maybe once on a final mixdown master.

The bass was made from several layers of resampling then 2 channels in the mixer with subs and mids separated and treated in the way I did in my tutorial except for all the filter moves where done with Camel Phat Bandpass filters which are really cool as you can mod the LP and HP separately and get all kinds of sounds from super fat subs to crazy mid stuff all in one place

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I like Mackity a lot and I just got the new Zplane LP/HP/BP and on first listen the LP sound really good. To be really useful though it needs to modulate really smoothly and I haven’t figured out connecting it up to some mod sources yet. I will definitely be doing some experiments in the coming weeks on all Chris’s plugs. I’m dreaming of a really great LP filter like the one on the EMU-E6400 ULTRA, it turned it into a true instrument not just a sample playback unit

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Haha! Not sure if any of this can be done in a ‘sane’ way and it can drive you a bit nutty sometimes but I can give you some thoughts that might help.

Firstly you should always look for the ‘best’ version of a sample, by that I mean if its a drum beat for example….can you get a really good wav recording rather than an mp3 for instance. There are sometimes lots of versions of something you are sampling…which one is best sounding? So you start as best as you can.

But sometimes you really want to use a sample but its all ragged and noisy and crackly maybe…that’s when you can do some ‘clean up’. I talked about Adobe Audition in my tutorial and on e of the things its is incredible at is cleaning up crusty samples. It has the sickest noise reduction plug built in….you basically find a tiny moment of just the noise and it samples that then removes it all perfectly from the whole sample plus it has a super cool tool called Auto Heal which is pretty magic…if you have blatant pop or crackly or some kind of short unwanted noise in your sample you just select the offending bit of audio and do Auto Heal and it magically disappears with the hole left covered up perfectly.

So you scrub the sample of noise and crackle and pops and then the final part is really down to polishing the sound in your mix with nicely balanced reverbs and delays and perhaps some chorus to thicken the sample to hide the noise reduction artifacts and smooth it all out

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Yeh it took a long time for me to get my head around the change but as with anything new you just need to get your head down and keep learning until you are getting what you want.

I have tried many different plugs to get the distortion I like but I regularly demo anything new that comes out but really I find CamelPhat, Trash 2, Decapitator and some of the Slate Digital op amp sims are really helpful

I have used Spectralayers since it demo’d the first release and yeh its cool at identifying harmonics related to the fundamental you are looking at in a super cool way but my problem with it is the end result always seems way to digitized and comb filtery sounding. Very cool but not built around the end result sounding good.

Audition has the Adobe paint tool which I am very used to using so I can literally paint over the frequencies I want to cut out perfectly and then when I extract them by copying to new it always sounds nice and more natural.

And big plus….Audition runs all my vst’s so I can do everything I want to make a sound in one place….and in my vid I forgot to mention I had set it up as my default audio editor in Cubase so its integrated into my DAW directly.

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I guess one of the things I miss the most is that analog gear meant I was moving around my studio all day doing different things in different places and it kept me from falling into the screen for endless hours which I think is helpful to keep it feeling creative and fun.

ITB is amazing though as it’s like having the world’s biggest craziest studio with endless possibilities.

Probably Rupert Photek

😉

Honestly, if you could get him to come back to jungle/drum n bass… I don’t know the full story behind him moving on to other things, but I can dream that a collab with you could possibly be a convincing enough reason. Even if it were a one off. But I understand these sorts of things need to be inspired rather than forced. His early work is one of my biggest influences.

The first part of my tutorial is pretty much my approach.

I’m looking for drone type sounds and anything that will make a really good top string and then some kind of rhythmic sound or noise to keep some idea of timing. I try not to put two of the same kind of sounds on top of each other so it ends up all mungy and unclear. Its about contrast but I try and get a really simple string or drone melody to start with and then lay everything else out over that to make sure it all ties together.

I have my EMU’s still but for them to sound like they did in Wormhole for instance would mean I would have to have thousands of pounds of wiring redone and then only use basic midi and no DAW audio because plugging the EMU’s into a DAW just doesn’t sound good at all…it loses all the good qualities of an all analog chain and trying to send DAW audio in to a mackie mixer for example sounds super crap…thin and nasty….so the two worlds just don’t play nicely no matter what I have tried.

I have used most well known synths over the years but a really complex modular synth is a bit of distraction mostly when actually making a song under a time deadline which all analog mixing was under as there was no recalling your mix

Shape Future bass is the just a rip from the Pro-One sampled into the EMU E6400 Ultra then it was distorted in the mackie by using FULL gain and Full EQ’s with a mid-parametric sweep to change the tone of the distortion plus a delay added then sent to the Focusrite EQ to make the rediculously distorted input nice again by having low input gain and adding back undistorted bass and treble boost and sending it all back to another Mackie channel at a nice balanced level. I hand modded the eq sweeps’s on the mackie and delay levels throughout the track to make it move around.

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Cheers for your knowledge, your music, and the response. It’s ridiculously satisfying to hear all the backstory info in this thread about tunes that have basically become the soundtrack for my life!

Yeh it took me ages to figure out how to get that type of kik to sit in a track without killing the bassline and without it sounding like an obvious short kik with long reverb that could be made in 2 minutes. Also getting the original kik which are all just kiks from breaks I was using to have that boom and it sound like one thing its really tricky. Firstly I realised through experiments that long plates would get you the boom but they bleed over the snares and each other if they are just run as a send over a kik. So then I tried sampling the reverbs from my outboard using each kik separated and recorded one by one with just the reverb output being sampled. Then I could control their volume shape and level and exactly where and how they ended to make sure they never went over the next snare or kik and possibly filter them down. After that I turned to resampling the whole thing again to have single hits to just drop in any beat I wanted.

Another technique that worked really well but was a bit of work to do was playing just the kik really loud on my speakers and then taking a mic and placing it facing into the bottom corner of the studio and recording the super bass heavy clomping sound from the mic then adding it back into the sampler as a layer under the kik or sometimes snare….so real room reverb and very chunky from being in the corner of the room basically

We used to record drums being played at top volume through my BM15’s to get a more chunky version of a break or to pad out a weedy break sample too quite a bit…to capture the feel of a lashing beat….The drums in Crisis were made that way.

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I’m gonna answer your last question first if that’s cool. I’m no one to give good life advice here and you must choose your way in life as best you can and no matter what you choose then go for it. Music is a highly competitive area to live and work in but in this day and age if you are truly dedicated and you also are brave and committed to saying what you have to say then it is incredibly rewarding and lets you decide your own path. I have been working professionally for 30 years and I know from my own journey and then seeing how really talented and hardworking people who are dedicated do actually make a living with a bit of luck.

It sound like a nice life living in Thailand and making music for sure. I might do the same one day

I never used the Zplane filters in the EMU…they were weird and not very useful….The LP/HP/BP filters and once in a while the Notch filter were all I used….but 95% of tracks it was just the LP and HP

I think this is the only tune I can remember using those Zplane filters on a bass…The Watcher by me and Fresh:

As for hardware synths you mentioned I think investing in the best Controller Keyboard would be the best way to get creative. My Panamara P4 is great….it has all the controller types you could ever need and then you can hook it up to all the cool vsts out there and have a really good way to play sounds with proper human expression

Good luck with whatever you decide to do mate

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In a DAW probably Filter Freak 1 + 2 for character or Fabfilter Volcano for Clarity

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Awesome, I’ve been using those too!

Oh and for good sweep I use the Bandpass Filter in CamelPhat with some distortion added to accent it

Gotta try that bandpass trick, thank you! 😀

I never use resonance on a filter ever unless I’m making an ‘acid’ type sound BTW….. Never on Bass sounds…like ever

Great question… Would love to see a video attempt at recreating the bass from watermelon without hardware. Not sure it would ever sound quite as good.

Not Identical for sure but I think the same process still works….I have just been trying it out but the hardest part is getting the right balance of saturating just until the 3rd harmonic hits the point where it distorts and adds a couple more higher harmonics which bring it from being just a fat reggae type bass to the more in your face result from watermelon…I find that digital plugs never capture that smooth breakup in the mids still…it always has too much edge when you get to the right amount of overdrive

If you make sure your two OSCillators are up at max volume, one Sawtooth and one Triangle or two Sawtooths with one being the octave below the other and then slightly detuned from each other as a starting point. Then bring down the filter cutoff until all you can hear is fat subby bass. From there you want to dial in some ENV to the cutoff to get some kind of shape to the rise from the subs to mids and back, add some Keyboard too to the Filter cutoff which will raise the filter cutoff the higher the note you play, plus in the mod section switch LFO to filter cutoff with a slight wobble to add some movement. Then I generally record a riff or just play notes and hand modulate the cutoff to add even more movement but with an eye on making sure there are subby parts and growly parts and everything in between. I just record a big long section and then go back and sample it and cut it up into useful snips to put back together in the way I like

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Oh and make sure you setup the Glide Portamento function to Legato to get bends of pitch with overlapping notes to really make it more expressive. Plus in the mod section the coolest thing on a Pro-One is that you can switch OSC B output to the Filter Cutoff…if you think this through its moving the cutoff so fast in the shape of OSC B that it ends up being a whole other OSCILLATOR with crazy tones that no other analog synth can make, this is really useful for making stabs too….the stabs in Shape The Future Remix are live from the Pro-One with all the weird filtering coming from that mod switch trick….it makes the Pro-One totally unique and capable of really weird tones you can add into bass and stabs

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I think Satellites is one track that I feel really seemed to create itself somehow into something that was so different with the bass having a different time signature from the drums and still working somehow plus the bass was one of the deepest results I got from my setup in SOHO where Wormhole and all the early Virus tracks were made

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Its all made from my custom wavetables taken from the original Fixation bass and put back together in Serum. I went over the whole process in the last part of my tutorial if you want a deeper look at how its done.

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I think it was made from further mangling of the bacteria bass sound as I remember….more distortion, more mad pitch bending and then filtering and EQ sqeeping followed by final layer of distortion saturation in the EQ and back into the desk for some stereo send fx to give it some width.

Yeh use some parallel distortion (Trash, Camelphat etc.) over a copy of my whole drum buss to get crunch and then buss both the clean and distorted final drum buss/tracks together and then my favourite thing to use is simply the Sonnox Limiter set to default, no gain added, no gain removed, with exactly 25% Enhance Slider which brings back the crunchy but smooth top end from all the distortion and melds it all together into one clear channel. This setting works for just topping it off level wise and adding some polish. I also keep my rides and cymbals and really high frequency stuff out of the clean main and distorted drum busses and send it straight to the final grouped buss to keep it out of all the distortion and give the clean drum buss more bite and clarity. I use stereo fx and enhancing on the clean cymbals which are all sends outside the drum busses so they stay independent and clean and then only get squashed in the very final group bus which keeps them nice and clear and sparkly

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The OSCar is really useful for the more unusual acid type sounds and for weird bleeps and strings and arps because it has 2 analog OSC’s plus a digital Wavetable OSC and also because it had 2 independent filters that could be chained or mixed together which is very unusual for an old mono synth. It isn’t particularly good for big bass sounds like the Pro-One for instance but for really out there tones for mid range sounds it is amazing even now. Its the bass fill part in Watermelon that is slightly like an acid bass sound but doesn’t have much sub in it for instance and it made many of the electronic bleep and stab sounds in our early songs

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Jonny is a really cool guy and he created so many new vibes in the 90’s so it was a pleasure to work with him.

The resonant layer on the bass in Viper you mentioned was the result of a technique I was using a lot around that time…it’s simple in todays terms but it works much better in analog world because of the saturation being very ear pleasing…In most standard outboard and desk eq’s you would have 3 or 4 bands: a low shelf, a low mid parametric band, a high mid parametric band and a high shelf plus in and output gains. The parametric bands come with a Frequency position, Q width and Cut/Gain level, the shelves just Frequency and Cut/Gain level. If you put all the gains up to maximum you get a fair bit of distortion but the trick to the resonance is to have the upper mid parametric eq set to the thinnest Q setting and having the low mid set to the widest Q setting…then you just sweep the upper mid bands Frequency band by hand to get the resonant sweep and the fact that the other 3 bands are up full and wide means that you keep the fat bass sound intact whilst having the mid band as the very thin movement on top…if you don’t push all the other bands then the mid sweep would sound too horrible and scratchy and bad for the ears when loud and with no bass end….the final gain section in the eq will just squeeze it back together into one pretty level bass sound but with movement added

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It’s a revelation to me in this and another response, that people were pushing those desks so hard back then – not just gain but also abusing the EQ! Appreciate all your responses, thank you for doing this.

Both me and Ed grew up listening to a really wide variety of music. Me personally, I grew up in West London in a mostly Irish and West Indian neighbourhood and I was really inspired a lot by the huge bass sound systems at Notting Hill Carnival in the 70’s and 80’s and also funk and disco music was very popular in the parties where I grew up too. I have always loved any music with a great flowing beat or fat bass like funk and reggae or rap music.

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Thanks, i’ve never seen this approach before so a bit of a learning curve for me; i was trying to be strategic with mine! My first thought was to grab Iris as it’s usually on sale so i can follow along with it. BF round the corner as well so there’ll doubt be some good deals around.

Do you know where i can find an older version of Adobe? I’m on high sierra so i can’t run the latest version but i could at least use to follow the process in the videos.

Cheers!