I don't understand how to properly make or automate growl basses

N

Nexosaur

Multi-Genre Maker


Something that has been bothering me lately is that I am horrible at automating growls and making growls that aren't sub shaking. What I want to learn is how to make a bass like at 1:01 in the song above. I can't find anything like it because I can't find any growl bass tutorials that aren't "LEARN TO MAKE SKRILLEX HEAVY ASS GROWL BASS WITH MORE LOW-END THAN UR MOM."

If someone could get me at least started on the right track, that'd be awesome.
 
Pretty much all basses with that sound are made by FM synthesis, so you really need an FM synth. Massive can just about do it, but it's not the ideal tool for the job: FM8, sytrus, toxic biohazard, rhino, synthmaster or even operator would be better.
Seamlessr has covered FM growl basses absolutely to death, so you could start going through the 'how to bass' series. The general pattern seems to be to get a sine wave, FMed by a load of other sine waves or triangle waves in some odd routing pattern, with one of the sines/triangles 4 octaves up. Then compress it a lot and possibly add some vocoding.
 
I know what you mean, there are countless of noob tutorials on it with mediocre and awkward sounds.

Growl are pretty much done in 3 different ways:
- Using FM, where you control a certain modulator's (or several ones') amplitude to achieve a growl (the best one imo).
- Using formant filtering, where you create a rough and heavy timbre, and let it run through some filters that in the end mimic the sound of a mouth (can create surprisingly good results sometimes, but can also sound completely awkward sometimes). This technique is the one people use the most when they do it in Massive.
- Using vocoding, where you again create a rough and heavy timbre, and let a recording of someone doing random sounds with the mouth be the modulator in a vocoder (not that experienced with this, but I've seen people who do it).

So dive into FM synthesis, and formant filtering, and vocoding.

Then, a lot of important stuff happens in the FX chain afterwards to take the growl sound to the level it has in many songs. Check out Resampling Synthesis, and perhaps also watch clips how people treat Reese-basses, since a lot of that processing is applicable to growls.

Lastly, check out SeamlessR on YouTube, if anybody knows what he's talking about when creating monsterbasses - it's him.
 
Thanks! I have looked at some SeamlessR on Youtube before, but since there's so many tutorials, I probably just didn't see it.
 
Just copy the "LEARN TO MAKE SKRILLEX HEAVY ASS GROWL BASS WITH MORE LOW-END THAN UR MOM." and then hipass the sub out
 
I use three. I use FL (for now but my PC is nearly dead and I'll have to give it up eventually), Ableton (not often because it's pirated and I don't feel comfortable using it because I'm used to FL), and Logic Pro X (as of two days ago).
 
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