The right sub for the job

“If a mix contains too many elements fighting to be heard, it can start to sound pretty messy”

Clearly, there are plenty of ways to make and process sub bass sounds. We can use saturation to introduce more harmonics and make our bass sound more full, or apply pitch modulation to make it more punchy. Given all of the options available, why would anyone ever opt for a straight-up sine or triangle wave oscillator?

The answer is simple: context. When we’re designing sounds in isolation, it’s tempting to go all-out and make them as full-sounding and over-the-top as possible. The problem is that if a mix contains too many elements fighting to be heard, it can start to sound pretty messy. A big, low-pass filtered sawtooth bass might work well when it’s played on the offbeat and no other sounds are occurring at the same time, but it could sound awful when it plays simultaneously with a harmonically rich kick drum. Sub sounds with long, obvious pitchbends work well in tracks where they don’t conflict with lots of other musical elements, and filtered square-wave tones are generally most at home when they don’t clash with bass layers such as the one we make in our Layering midrange bass and sub bass in Massive walkthrough on the following page. Pick the right sub and bass sounds for the track from the start, and you won’t have to struggle so hard fitting them into the mix.

The tricky part is when you want your track to sound really full and clean – for example, if you’re producing reese-heavy DnB or dubstep. You may well have a layer above your sub bass that descends into the range in which your kick and snare’s fundamental frequencies lie, and highpassing those lows makes the bass sound weak. In situations such as these, sidechain compression is often the answer – use it to make the sub and bass duck in volume when the kick or snare play, giving you weighty bass and punchy beats.