Dubstep Production Guide
From Dubstepforum
VST(i)s
Any synth will do for bass... man even my 8 year old son can make a phat bass using the shitist of vst's....try any synth with 2 oscs a low pass filt and an lfo...always start with the basics a sine wave...find the key u like, then layer with 2nd osc..play with tuning to see how the waves phase.... u can get some nasty growlls just by doing this....try tunning cents 25-50 with a square wave...
Albino
Trilogy, z3ta, bass station etc. Samples run through kontakt or esx24 as well boss.
fruity 3 x osc
The Korg MS-20 VSTi (part of the Korg Legacy package) is pretty brutal.
All i use for making bass is Absynth 3 now.
Ableton Operator
v-station...although pretty much any synth can make a nice fat bass, bass sounds are generally not that complex.
Reaktor. It's got a mind of its own sometimes though.
Native Instruments
Currently i make a lot of my patches on albino 2, kicks ass. Especially as you can assign the appregiator in the modulation matrix. Assigning to the filters can give mad results! Such a simple but powerful synth. Also use z3ta, absynth 3 quite a bit. Thats bout all i can think of, of the top of my head. Thats all good, but if you want to make really original sounds, its bout processing and layering and more layering and reprocessing your bass patches.
Free VSTs
To kick off I've found the Tridirt Multiband distortion http://www.noizware.com/software.htm which seems to be pretty hot for beefing up drum sounds wth high and low adjustable frequencies and separate gains for all bands. Probably seen it but http://www.knufinke.de/sir/index_en.html SIR convolution reverb - loads of impulses available to download for free off the net, you can also get interesting pads if you load wav files as an impulse and turn off the original signal. Also recommend the Digitalfishphones site - good quality compressors, enhancers, etc http://www.digitalfishphones.com/main.php?item=2&subItem=1 - also some AU plugs for Mac users kjaerhus do some cool freebies > www.kjaerhusaudio.com and they actually sound decent too... classic filter (great workhorse filter) and teh classic phaser just found this as well, though I haven't tested it yet > www.tone2.com - Its called the bi filter, its got tons of different filter types and a few distortion options too, might be handy for mid bass mainpulation at least
Think there's some good stuff out there http://bigtick.pastnotecut.org/index.php seems to be a right, nasty distortion device And of course for various dub stylings where else but http://www.interruptor.ch/vst_overview.shtml, new version of Bionic Delay looks good, been using the original instead of the tape delay in Logic, as it has a well nice echo drift effect (have mentioned this before elsewhere, but quality goods)
Distortion VSTs
Try greasetube, or if you have PSP vintage warmer turn up the knee know and the drive but keep an eye on the volume.
Izotope + Pluggo-bundle
Camel crusher... more like compression that turns into distortion but amazing on drums. fizzy on bass, but... FREE.
Antares tube
Here are some good ones:
Ohmboys Predatohm
Retroband
Voxengo Lampthruster
Voxengo AFTapebus
And some good freebies as well:
Audio Damage Fuzzplus
Noizware TriDirt
Christian Budde Christortion
Voxengo Tubeamp
GClip
Kingston RetroBand Lite
Smartelectronix Cyanide
Voxengo Boogex
Cyanide 2 does bad things to sounds
Camelphat 3 & predatohm
Deffo agree with the camelphat
Dead suprised that on-one's mentioned the psp vintage warmer yet tho - that plug is STANDARD in the studes.
Quadrafuzz
Destroyfx Polarizer is cool. It's a pretty standard bitcrusher, until you hit the 'implode' button. Does what it says on the tin.
I like Vintage Warmer (http://www.pspaudioware.com/plugins/vintage.html)
Wobble Bass
++ Great basics tutorial by untold ++ http://www.dubstepforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=780&start=15
++ Other good one by decklyn ++ http://dubstepforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=16385
It's all about assigning the LFO of your synth to change when you adjust a certain parameter. For example you can set the lfo to change rate when you move the pitch bend on your keyboard. Higher pitch makes it go faster and vice versa.
You can also take a bassline and double it up and then pitch one up or down a little bit. The offtime phase cancellation will cause the sound to wobble. Also the speed of the wobble will increase or decrease depending on which note you hit next.
The other way is to sample a short clip of a bassnote with a amplitude or filter envelope on it. Then take that short sample, put it in your sampler and set it to loop. This will also achieve the same increase or decrease in wobble speed as described above. The upside to those methods is that you still have your LFOs free to other interesting things and get more complex sounds.
Stick to synthesis for the time being, as pitching down samples will introduce other audible 'artifacts' to the sounds (to do with the aliasing and resolution of the sample), which will require further filtering to eliminate - unless you can set a higher sampling rate to get around this.
If u want more freedom than the boring old synced wobble you can draw an automation curve in the cc channel of your choice, assigned to filter cutoff knob you can make sick morphing sounds this way, instead of being locked to straight sync on 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc.
With Albino assign a filter at the bottom and youll get extra wump wump.
Guitar pedal wah wah with diff rate release.
Cyclotron : http://www.device.arcanedevice.com/?sig_mod
Sub Bass
A sub consists mostly of one or more (detuned) sines, with additional overtones. for just a sub, use a sine. for a sub with some character (by using overtones), use square or saw (i prefer square) waves and detune them, then put them through a lowpass filter. you'll want a steep filter (24db) or use eq afterwards to make room for your kick. to get them wobblin you can use a sine lfo linked to the cutoff, but be careful to stay in the sub-range because you'll want a nicely defined kick with some meat and punch too, which will sit in the 80-120hz range. since hz*2 is the span of an octave, you'll want the ground-note of your sub (and thus your track) lying around 30-40 hz for maximum bass weight. then you have groundnotefrequency*2 as the room for your sub to accompany your mids or your melodies, which will be between 30-80hz. oh yeah, use some compression carefully (to avoid clicks) to pump it up.
1.Turn the filter right down
2.turn the resonance slightly above the filter
3.Higher notes are sometimes more 'bassy' than low ones
> for a sub with some character (by using overtones), use square or saw (i prefer square) waves and detune them.
Sorry to disagree... the Sub should be a pure Sine. Anything different from that is technically midrange. A square wave is just a Limited Sine, and the extra hummy metalic fuzz is definitely higher up the spectrum than the body of the sub.
When you filter a sound, it means you remove it's harmonics. Every single (harmonic) sound is constructed out of a lot of sinewaves, each varying in amplitude and pitch. The groundnote is the first of those sines, so when you lowpass a squarewave until about 40hz with a 24db slope, then you'll have something almost like a sine remaining. The difference is that there'll be some subtle differences between a lowpassed squarewave and a sine, since you won't cut off all of it's harmonics. A sine alone has no harmonics. More info about harmonics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonics
> since hz*2 is the span of an octave, you'll want the ground-note of your sub (and thus your track) lying around 30-40 hz for maximum bass weight. You lost me there... What's a ground note? And do you mean that the frequency of a note, X2, gives you an octave from the original note? I guess to get 30-40hz will require different note pitches depeding on the sound...
When you write music, you'll find yourself using scales. for dancemusic (and dubstep in particular) there's often not a 'classic' scale present, but most of the time your track will have one particular note which is it's 'base' note. this is what i meant by groundnote. i could be wrong by calling it a groundnote since i don't really know for sure that's what it's called in English. What I meant by freq*2 is that when you have a pitch of for example 30hz, the upper octave of this pitch will be at 60hz. when you go another octave up, it will be 120hz, etc. When you have a sub, you will want it to leave room for a decent kick which will lie in the range of 80-120hz. A (western) scale is always divided into an octave, so you'll need an octave to support your melody with your sub. When your 'base' note or groundnote as i called it is lying around 44hz, then you'll have 44hz to 88hz as a range for your sub. This might sound a bit cryptic and i really can't explain it better in english, but you could do some further reading at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency
It's hard to get a sub punchy without a click. It depends what kind of sub you want.
If you want more of a wooop sub (sorry can't write sounds) then I usually cut out any high frequencies, like the guy above said - put a filter on it and turn the frequency down to about 50hz or something. EQ is also a good thing.
What I like to do is make sub in a synth, EQ and filter it and then export that - load it into soundforge and put a little (and just a little) PSP Maximiser (if you don't have this - get it, it's fucking ace) on it, then load that back in. You might have to EQ it some more or whatever. A tiny bit of tape distortion on you sub before you export sounds nice also. Just make sure that the 'final' product is mono you can try layering kicks over your sub - make sure you cut out the low frequencies otherwise they will clash. This is like a 'pseudo' punchy sub - it makes it sound like it's punchy, but really it's the kick that makes it punchy. But getting kicks/subs to sit well together is another subject man, it takes a bit of fucking around to make it sound right with EQ.
I don't use a synth. just generate tones in cool edit and then get to work on eq, filtering, distorting, pitch bending etc.... I doubt it makes much difference as both ways are just using an oscillator tone and adding effects. As for EQing etc... depens on the sound but a nice dynamic EQ can give some nice timbres to the sound.
I usually use Novation V-Station (VST) for the sub. With some eq'ing, maybe some PSP Vintage warmer and a little compression. Or alternately I load up a nice fat 808 kick in Kontakt and eq it to suit.
Recently though, I've been using Albino..
Start with an blank patch..
Fire up a couple tracked sine waves and send it to filter 1 (low passed)
1 or 2 saws or triangles (possibly detuned) and send to filter 2 (high passed)
Overdrive filter 2.
Mix a small about of filter 2 into fliter 1 for grunt.
LFO mod to pitch
LFO mod to filter 2
Low pass the entire instrument.
Add a small amount of emu-tube distortion if needed. Compress to taste.
EQ - 24db/oct cut at >28(ish) boost frequency of the tunes key.. (or it's 3rd or 5th depending on what key) cut a pocket for the kick.. boost a bit of umph in the 130-170 range (depending if there is a "midbass" layer in the track or not)
Grime Bass
A good trick for fatttening up your sound and introducing interesting harmonics is to copy the same MIDI part to two or more different instruments. That way all the parts are locked in the same rhythm but making different sounds and playing off of eachother. A couple of higher pitched elements can actually produce harmonics in the bass range. If I'm not mistaken, it's a technique that Macabre Unit uses to great effect.
A square or saw wave anyware from 40-60hz in a sampler should do it. Use a lowpass filter and tweak away. Use an EQ to cut the higher freq's out and boost what ever low end range your looking for. Compress carefully if needed.
Or just get a bassy sound out of any synth and again, cut the highs out and boost the lows just enough for it to hit as hard as you need it to.
Miscellanous Bass Processing
When using distortion i always seperate and layer my bass by frequency, the cleaner you want it the more your gonna have to layer. BUt leave the the sub frequencies (or anything below 80-90) clean. A simple technique and can add depth and harmonics is:
Duplicate the midi notes, create a new instance of the bass synth with same patch but change the fillering to a high-pass or boast the resonance and play around the cut off.
Get a parametric eq and scoop out the mids (200 - 500 hz) to achieve a "hollow" square bass effect. works damn well if you do it right... but eq before and after distortion in a send works great.
Use a better filter than the albino, i suggest psp nitro
Try also running your basses through an analogue modeled compressor. Automate volume for more saturation color.
PSPs MixBass is one of my fav plugins for adding that grimey coloration.
Clanking Sound
You should be able to get some good results by pitch shifting a snare, adding reverb and distortion.
Get yourself a digital recorder, olympus makes a nice one (75 bills US). Take a day out and record the sounds around you. Trust me you'll find all sorts of audio gold. Process the hell out of them through whatever you use, repeat.
An FM synth should get you metalic/clangy sounds. As was said up thread go for the field recording if you can. You could do something as simple as recording you pots and pans. Slow the sample down and eq the unwanted freqs...
Try out the Ugo texture VST plugin
Its free and you can get some nice industrial sounds out of it.
Have you tried the FX unit Metallurgy? That is one wicked FX unit. This will mangle your sounds in a very good way.
Structure
Give the DJ's something (clear. obvious. 16-32 bars long) to mix in and out of, and build a breakdown/drop for a really obvious build/release of energy. Other than that, the middle's up for grabs.
Obviously each tune will develop and require different layouts and the only strict rule is keep your phrases built in 16 bar blocks..... Maybe to get started try :
16/32 bar intro
64 bar main body 1
16 bar breakdown
49 bar main body 2
16 bar outro
Switch up the 1st 16 of the 2nd main body (chopped beat, varied bass??)
Keep adding and subtracting the elements...
THERE AIN'T A FORUMULA. Thats what you DnB heads need drilled into ur skulls..
- if u only draw inspiration from dubstep, then guess what, at best ur gonna end up soundin like every one else, I doubt u'd even get up to that level with out creativity and originality. - Stop goin on about how many snares in a bar or where to put everything. It simply does not matter.
Like forensix said. - Learn reason before you learn dubstep. then we wont get a shedload of beats that sound like shite ha, and ppl askin if they're good. of course they wont be good, u'v used reason for 2 fakin days !
Dubstep is still one of the most open ended genre titles [thank fuck] use that freedom to see where you can take it, rather than seeing it as a negative constraint to which you must adhere to at all costs. Better still aim to make the best music you can, and if it fits the bill great it'll go in the dubstep section at yr local shop, in all honesty though is that really gonna make it any better a tune than it going in any other section?
This is a creative art, so get creative.
Freedoms a good thing. Conformity isn't going to get you any props in music.
