> Step by step
4. Designing a thick synthwave bass with Dune CM
1 A defining sound of synthwave is the tight, snappy synth bass. Let’s use Dune CM to synthesise one – load up an instance of the synth, then initialise the patch by clicking on the Bank B button in the centre panel. We’re going to use three oscillators to create our patch. Firstly, move the Osc Mix dial to 50% to bring oscillator two into the mix.
2 Let’s add low-end power by lowering oscillator two’s pitch by an octave – turn Osc 2’s Semi dial to -12. Next, we can add even more sub weight by blending in oscillator three. A lot of 80s synth makers used square waves for a sub layer. Mimic this by changing Osc 3’s waveform to square and turning the Level control up to max.
3 This sound should be snappy and punchy, so let’s get the amplitude and filter envelopes involved. Set both the filter and amp envelopes to Attack 0, Decay 55, Sustain 0 and Release 50. This gives us the basic shape we’re after, but for the right amount of punch, we’ll need to employ the filter…
4 Head to the filter section and pull the Cutoff dial to 40 to smooth things off. If we control the filter with an envelope, we can give a sharp attack to the sound – make that happen by turning the Env dial up to 58. This sounds OK, but for more aggressive filtering, use the dropdown box to change the filter to Lowpass 24dB, which steepens the filter slope.
5 We can thicken and widen our sound via the Unison section. The voice control allows you to layer voices on top of each other, so turn the Voices dial up to 6 to add in some unison layers. Turn the Spread dial up to max, which pans each the voices out to the sides of the stereo field, giving our bass lush width.
6 FM synthesis was popular in the 80s, and it’s a great way of getting a little bite into your sound. Move to the Osc Common section and turn the dial marked FM1 up to 40 to sharpen the attack stage of the patch. It’s a reasonably subtle change, but it’ll help the bass cut through the mix when we start layering things up.