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Production Tutorial: Distortion & Complex Bass Design

🕑 Added 2021-03-25 13:30:41 +0000 UTC

Comments

Aro Domingos

Is this sort of bass design possible using vital ? Im not a big fan of operator so would be nice to know I could redo this on vital :)

Raghav Wagh

top centre on lfo where it says 'mod' , click that, it will change it to 'remote' and you will see the curves moving.

kentower

Howdy! Awesome tutorial, after 4h I am at Minute 23 :D. I am on ableton 12 and for me with the LFO I hear the automation but I dont see the bell curves move. Does anyone know what I mean and have a solution to it? I mean it works but its hard to see, would like to have it was possible.

Ethan

The thinness can come from so many points in the process, like if u have auto warp on and any of the bounces u do aren’t unwarped before putting them in the sampler, or if any of the cutoffs from the splits are too far apart or automated to be so, genuinely so tricky

Ethan

Such a legend

Ethan

44:45 “gonna label some stuff cus this’ll get quite complicated… AT SOME POINT”

Auto Focus

How do they get the bass to sound so full? I follow all the steps and mine still sounds thin in comparison. Maybe it's a difference in volume.

SamL

🤯 been in the back of my mind to join this patreon and wow what have i been doing. i knew something like this existed here and yea wow...

Regular Joe

I saw that too. My guess is the sustain of the filter envelope is at 100.

Andy

HAHA! That literally just happened to me (and it takes a LOT longer than 35min to 'get' to 35min in the tutorial). Sometimes I just wanna throw the laptop out the window like a frisbee. Still - the patches do sound sick before that. Who knows... Glad it wasn't just me

Andy

I giggled at that... but now I've started working through it I can see why. Gee Wiz! It's totally awesome though. I'm hoping once I make the patch, to replace the distortion units with others I more commonly use to 'compare' all the different versions I can make

Carlos

filters look activated in Operator but they aren't really activated, right?

BASSdrop0700

Neutron 4 has the Trash distortion now

Serf Flerpers

for the past 3 years ive tried going through this tutorial maybe 2 or 3 times a year and every time once it gets to around the 35 min mark my bass stops doing the thing. anytime i try automating that resonated eq into all the saturation and distortion it just sounds like garbage

Feddie

Trash 2 and Tantrum both discontinued.. lol

Feddie

It's taken me 3 hours to get through the first 10 minutes of this

Braden Legg

that intro is gold

Danny Roth

Apparently tantrum is sold out, weird for a vst

Ben

Hey Will. There is a really throaty, moist bass that you use in tracks like Chalk It Out (1:00-1:10). It's definitely my favorite KS bass - was wondering if you could shed some light on this! Is it a single track similar to the above tutorial; i.e., multiple parallel effects? Or is it layered with some type of foley or a specific distortion? It's such a cool, strange sound because it has such a guttural character but not over the top.

IDG Music

i'm really REALLY late to this, but their first tutorial did cover the rack, and also taught a more basic bass sound which is a quick and dirty solution :) oh yeah, and it's a simpler

Exactly what i was looking for bro thank you so much!

Michael Lein

Having an issue with my Pitch after the final resample. When i pitch up or down on the midi the tone changes but it doesn't really have an effect on the distortions. I set Transposition to a macro knob from Simpler and got this result. When I switch to sampler the transposition works with the distortions, but i cant map that to a knob for automations. Any idea?

Jas McHugh

the gain staging into the distortion is a huge tip. Thanks!

Diego

Raghav--thank you. That makes perfect sense. Cheers

Raghav Wagh

Its to bring it back to 'C'. Bass is strongest on 'F' so they designed it on 'F' to get clean and beefed tones and the brought it 'C' so that they can play whatever key want to from the midi.

Diego

can anyone explain the reasoning behind pitching the midi up 31 steps, instead of 36? 13:40

Tamir Livneh

this is insane, I have never seen someone have this much control over their bass, most people just resample once its gets too messy. sick as fuck.

Richard Carter

Cheers mate, have since worked out how to do this and now can see how much of a nooby question I asked haha

Martin Haugen

you just have to make a group of the plugins, just mark the plugins you want to make macros with, and hit cmd+G. This puts all the plugins in a group, and to the far left you see a sidebar. Click the icon on top(icon is a macro) and voila

Spencer Heaslip

Thank you so much. So innovative and creative. Use of distortion is incredible!

PeacefulJeff

I gotta say this is incredible. thank you so much

KOAN Sound

Apologies for missing this! In the Filter section turn Freq/Key to 0%, and use 12db slope with filter at 18.5khz

Nate

2 minutes in and my mind is already blown. Fuggetaboutit

Richard Carter

This is so awesome, however I may have to bill Koan Sound for a new pair of trousers. Only problem I'm encountering (apart from shitting my pants) is with the macro rack, anyone know how to create something like that? Any videos online or anywhere I can download something similar? Any help much appreciated. Cheers and keep up the awesome tutorials!

Richard Carter

Yeah man I'm struggling with the same thing. I'm trying to make a rack similar to the macro rack but am struggling because I is noob.

5EPHRO5_patron

incredible

Joel Sinnott

For reallllll!!!!

From what I understand they do not run a sub under this, instead they just treat the sub frequencies carefully enough through the multiband EQing process that it is not necessary.

Jonah

would love to know the answer to this!

Andy Pletch

so after all that do you run a clean sub channel?

Evan Christian

Dont sleep on the gains. i love the level of control , i feel the power!

Liam Thomas

Madness, thank you!

Peter Vogl

Some info for folks inclined to try Tantrum as seen in this video...currently it appears to crash Ableton, Bitwig, and Logic on Mac/Big Sur. I am using an intel chip so this is not a M1 thing. So far I'm having some difficulty getting information about this from them. When I get a coherent response I will post that.

Ncrypt

Absolutely mind blowing stuff. Thank you!

Brandon Bowers

yeah the end turned my brain to mush. These guys are actually wizards

Brandon Bowers

you werent joking geez

Brandon Bowers

"I'll try distorting it because why not" sound design in a nutshell

Leon sleator

This is so amazing!!! Sometime you should make a tutorial for how to make your more mellow and subdued wobbly basses (like in the song Fuego). I am very curious how you make them

Ben bagley

is that a simpler or a sampler on the first re sample? you say its a sampler but its labeled simpler :'( cant get those sexual pitch bends

MZRY

This has to be one of the more insightful tutorials I have ever watched for any type of bass music,. Clearly explained and demonstrated on a subject that is purely experimental. Thanks a lot for sharing this information it is definitely a more advanced tutorial but opens up endless possibilities in the realm of Automation and DIstortion. I managed to get Tantru on sale when i first watched and its a really interest tool coupled with the likes of Trash and Outputs Therma and Portal too. :D You Guys are Sick Thanks Again!!!

Sayka Sound

Thank you for sharing 🔮

Shru-ti

That would be pretty cool, especially this project .

Kofta Ball

Second this.

Peter Vogl

Don't know if anyone has suggested this but for many of these videos an Ableton project to study with the processing you are showing would help tremendously. It's easy to let stuff slip by...I work through these with Ableton after watching it once and find I miss many small things along the way. Studying the musical examples of how you applied the techniques would be awesome. Not asking for your actual tunes just the examples you create for these vids. Thanks again.

Peter Vogl

Got pretty lost near the end but I'll watch and work with it a few more times. I think I'm probably not alone there.....quite the chain(s)....Thanks guys I am eating this stuff up.

Bob Gibson

after watching the whole thing, I vote for this as best tutorial of all time, all catagories

Bob Gibson

wow this is amazing, thanks!

Lele Gambera

thanks

martin colegate

probably the best tutorial i ever watched. thanks, guys...

theda3g0

nevermind. It's an envelope assigned to the pitch. ... I think.

theda3g0

anyone know what the macro in the sampler is that massively increases the sound on attack? https://imgur.com/a/81wROhG

Ward Yaworski

I went back and watched again and caught that! thank you though, there are a couple instances they do that

JJ Lyon

Yeah the limiter prevents any clipping on the channel as its the last thing in the chain :)

JJ Lyon

I think one of them is completely dry then he automates the one with the Valhalla on 100% wet as a wet/dry control!

Martian Moon

Thanks for the tip I already spotted and upped the sustain, but I did find a couple other minor things that were different & updated my default patch accordingly (I'd left velocity sensitivity at 50% whereas he has it at 0) However it's still not quite there, it seems to be something in the filter settings Would reallllllllllllly appreciate if the KOAN boys could drop that simple stock preset 🤓

Sam Wright

I notice that there is all kinds of clipping going on on various devices. is that not really a problem unless the track itself isn't clipping? Since we have the limiter.

Ward Yaworski

That Valhalla rack you use, do each of those chains have an instance of valhalla on them?

Sam Wright

One thing I noticed what that my original bounced sample was much quieter than theirs. My bounced sample had a lot more dynamic range whereas their's look almost flat - maxed out on volume. I couldn't figure out why mine was quieter but I maximized my sample and then that fixed this reverb issue. I was running into the same problem.

Frank Dee

yes

bogdan shilov

After hearing Maruda Sudden Death Yakz use Reason foe their sound design and now seeing you guys use it and how it actually works Im SO interested in it. Love the modular/analog approach! Im learning ableton AND reason in this one this is incredible content thank you!!

Eric Abraham

I had the same issue, check your sustain values because that seemed to be the problem with mine, oh and on the first osc their settings are a little different than the rest.

Martian Moon

Any chance you could share your Operator default patch? I'm only 3 mins in and I can't get my distorted white noise + sine patch to sound anything like yours (sounds awful) I noticed there are some weird things going on in the default Ableton operator patch though, & I think that may have something to do with it. I tried attentively copying every knob, value & parameter, but it's just... not working. Thanks for putting this together though, excited to continue it once I figure this out lol

Lisquander

This tutorial taught me more in an hour than I learned in months of school 🥴 I tried using the multiple and gate from trash 2 on those upper particles and it worked really interestingly!! Lol

KYEN

this video broke my brain, holy smokes!!

Ian McKenna

Chain. It was really weird. No matter what I did, even bringing the reverb chain volume down to near -infinity, it was somehow compressing it beyond the peak volume of the reese. Never seen that before. No matter, I still got real sick sounds out of it, if not quite as skullcracking as the ones they made. Practice makes... better. :)

YOKAI

I would really like to see some more abstract sound design FM synthesis techniques on the next tutorial.

YOKAI

Was the reverb in a chain, or on the entire track? If it was on one of the chains, it likely would have been easier to control

Saka

thanks for this, gents !

Ian McKenna

This is a great video, but I got stuck for like half an hour on the technique of adding a reverb tail and using the gate to get rid of the artifacts, because no matter what I did to adjust the reverb and/or the level of the reverb chain, the reverb tail was louder than the sampler signal, so the gate had to kill the whole sound in order to kill the tail. I dunno how that happened. Drove me nuts, so I just said 'fuck it' and got rid of the reverb.

Shanic

one of the most insigntfull things i've ever seen thank you so much

AeonVoyage

Holy hell this is a god-tier tutorial, thank you so much

Philly see

Super helpful, thank you !

FBWOT

This tutorial is incredible, thank you so much !

Bruno Poynton

This is so fucking coooooooooool!! Thanks

alexg

Noticed you have a limiter at the end of the chain on the original sound, is that always at the end of your chain when making these kinds of sounds?

Trevor

my cpu frowning as i watch this

Gypsyndicate

Unbelievably game changing. Thankyou so much.

Nuan Sonar

WHOOO indeed hahaha I fuckin' love you guys

Martin Koťátko

Alright. That's it. I'm gonna watch this every day before going to sleep. :D

Kaya Gulten

This is amazing! Much love for sharing these tricks!!

Kevin C. Holmes

bruhv

Caleb Cowie

Woah learnt so much, super inspiring, I like how aggressive you are with the EQs and never thought to use a utility to control the mayhem. Had a go processing my analog synths this way and got some cool results, thanks!

Garrett Davenport

You guys are unreal.

Akuro (James)

This was one of the BEST tutorials I've seen. Super helpful! Thank you so much!

John Bach

Man I was like tearing my hair out wondering what they were doing in the 2010s...

SYNCHRO

always knew u guys were using the tape mode in scream 4 lol thats my goto too

Josiah

🤯

Foreigna

Love this so much! Learning from true masters :D

Zsombor Deményi

If this was a youtube video it would break the internet

Zsombor Deményi

Even has time for the epic intro to the video 😃 i’m done

bezio

Racks on racks on racks. Utility before distortion...wtf have I been doing with my life. So appreciative to see this level of detail on your iterative process, thank you!

Weekend Astronaut

*Entire cities ablaze, planes falling from the sky like meteorites, screams of agony echoing civilization's last breath* "Let's see what else we can do"

Stickybuds

Will, the level of mastery displayed in this video is amazing. How you can keep track of all the different chains and parameters that effect each other almost made my head explode at some points. The concepts you go over show what's possible when you invest the time, it's inspiring, much respect and thanks.