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How To Make A Bouncy Synth Bass (Sound Design In Xfer Serum)

Here's a step by step tutorial on how to create a bouncy synth bass or 'Bounce Bass' in Serum. This one of those really versatile and staple sounds of electronic and pop music which is widely used in modern productions. The video tutorial is accompanied by a step by step guide so it's easy for you to follow along and create it yourself. 

Step by step guide

1. Open a new instance of serum.

2. Switch on the sub oscillator and also oscillator B.

3. On oscillators A and B, change the waveform to analog BD sine under analog waveforms list.

4. Pitch down oscillator A by one octave and increase the unison on oscillator B to 3. Then reduce the detune amount a little bit.

5. Reduce the sub level a little bit, bring it to 65-66%.

6. On envelope 1 increase the attack slightly to get rid of any clicks that might be generated due to the fast attack.

7. Keep the decay as it is but reduce the sustain amount drastically and increase the release to around 400-300ms.

8. The decay can be between 100-1000  add some character to it by changing the wavetable positions of both the oscillators with some LFOs and maybe an envelope or two.

9. Go to LFO 1 and leave the rate as it is to 1/4th and map it on to wavetable position 1. Also do the same exact thing for oscillator B.

10. Next, go to envelope 2 and make it shorter than envelope 1; maybe with a decay of 500 would be good with quick release and quick attack.

11. Map it on to oscillator A and make it subtle and get those harmonics above the fundamental sine wave. Next, add a filter to enable oscillator B and noise,; change it to low 18 or 24.

12. If you don't want the harmonics just filter some of them out without it sounding like a sine wave.

13. If you want to add some punch to it, switch on the noise oscillator and go to attack, kicks and go with no. 6 which suits it very well.

14. Make sure to enable one shot mode and enable key tracking so you can increase the level a little bit and make it more audible.

15. If you want to bring it out a little more, make sure to open up the cut off slightly so you can hear the transient coming through.

16. Go to envelope 3 and make it very short with very short attack, very fast decay around 30 or 20 ms.

17. Then go on to the matrix section, map envelope 3 to the global master tuning and pitch it up just a bit.

18. As you keep opening the filters you will get all those additional harmonics which are been generated.

19. If you want more of a tail to your sound, increase the release by a touch and increase the decay also just a little bit.

20. Now move onto the effects section. It's pretty straightforward. All you will need is some distortion and set it to tube.

21. Set the drive pretty high to about 60-70% and control the mix level based on how much drive you want. Then add a compressor to tame it's dynamics. A ratio of 4:1 is good and add just a tiny bit of gain to compensate for the compression.

23. One final thing is that since this is a bass sound, make sure it's in mono mode so that if you play multiple notes at once, the notes don't overlap. And that's how you make the sound! 

Hope you found the post useful. Check out mysticalankar.com for more info and music production resources like sample packs, sound banks and templates to take your productions to the next level!Â