Here's a step by step video tutorial about how to create a thick and deep Reese bass in Xfer Serum. This is the kind of bass you hear in songs like blank space, heartless, hate me and so many others. Since it's become such a popular sound, its important to be able to make easily so here's a Serum tutorial about it. :)
It's a low-mid heavy sound widely used in modern productions, especially in the genres of electronic and pop music. The video tutorial is accompanied by a step by step guide so it's easy for you to follow along and create it yourself.
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This sound is a simple saw tooth wave which has many voices slightly detuned and filtered. That’s essentially how you get to this sound.
Step By Step Guide:
1. Open a new instance of Serum
2. On Oscillator one choose the saw tooth wave and increase the unison amount to the maximum amount, i.e 16.
You will hear a big difference between 1 voice and 16 voices which sounds much more fat, bold and wide. It sounds slightly detuned because we are using all the 16 saw tooth voices which are slightly off-pitch from each other and this gives a flanging and complex texture.
3. Next, go into the effects tab. Add a hyper/dimension unit to give some width to it but make sure you don't overdo it.
4. You can also distort it quite a lot since it will be filtered out later. You can even add a compressor to really make the high end pop out and sound very crispy but just make sure to add a filter at the end.
It's best to use a steep filter to get the low-end rumble which you expect from a reese bass.
5. Next, increase the drive for fatness.
6. To improve your sound increase the attack time a little bit, make it a little slower since we want it to sound soft and smooth.
7. You can also switch it to mono and add some portamento to it when changing notes if you want the notes to glide from note to note.
8. To make your sound unique you can switch on the second oscillator and add higher harmonics to it. The possibilities are endless.
9. You can experiment with any waveform. For example, you could go with evolution from the digital waveforms list and turn up the octaves by 1 or 2 and increase the level to taste so that it blends with the main waveform on oscillator one.
10. If you want a chord kind of effect you can increase the pitch of the second oscillator by a few semitones preferably by +5 or +7.
This can make the second oscillator come through which harmonises with the root note and could therefore add interest to your sound.
You can always experiment with more waveforms but as a general rule of thumb, saw waves and any distorted or textured waves work the best. Whatever the waveform you choose it should have a higher harmonic content so that when it's filtered out you get a rumbling kind of deep but textured bass sound.
If you liked this tutorial click here to watch more sound design tutorials for Xfer Serum.
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! Thanks for checking it out. Have a great day!