10. Putting together a gliding, detuned Reese bass

1

A Reese bass is created by stacking detuned oscillators on top of each other. We’ve fired up Bitwig’s Polysynth and set two oscillators to the same waveform and octave range – we’re using saw waves for a gritty texture. If your synth has unison detune, add some extra voices for a thicker sound.

2

Next we’ll slightly detune each oscillator. Tune your first up by a few cents, and your second down by about the same. You’ll find there’s a sweet spot between ‘beating’, and things starting to sound out of tune, so detune to taste. We’ve hit the Mono button to make our patch monophonic.

3

For a classic flavour, so we’ve turned the Glide dial up to around 250ms. It’s OK, but it could use some extra grit – drop a distortion after your synth. Reese basses often have quite a hyped sound, so we’ve dropped in an EQ, boosted the highs and lows and taken a scoop out the midrange. Finally, we’ve added delay for bit of depth.