> Step by step

2. Recreating a Calvin Harris square bass sound

1 Plug ZebraCM into a channel within your DAW. Initialise the patch by going to the drop-down menu display and selecting Init from the bottom of the menu. Then go to the master Volume control, on the bottom right, and reduce it to the 12 o’clock position.

2 The main timbral source for the sound is a square wave, so click and hold on the waveform display, and drag the mouse upwards until you see a square wave. In the case of a square wave, this will be a value of 2.

3 We are going to use Osc2 in a slightly different capacity, but we still need to set it to a square wave. Drag the waveform until you see a value of 2 in the upper display, and then set the Volume for Osc2 to a value of 30.

4 Staying within Osc2, drop the main Tuning pot to -12. This is one octave below Osc1. Then move the Sync switch to the right, which turns on the Osc sync mode. Using the Sync pot which is just below the switch, set the pot to 26. This process has Sync’d Osc2 to Osc1.

5 Now move to the filter section on the right of the plugin, and select the LP OldDrive filter from the drop-down menu. You can access this drop-down by clicking on the filter type display. Once selected, adjust the Drive pot to a value of 35.

6 We need to make two more adjustments in the filter section; firstly, adjust the Cutoff control pot to a value of 62, and then adjust the Env2 pot to a value of 40. We’re creating a little bit of filter bite, at the front of the sound’s attack.

7 It’s time to move to the envelope section, and we will start with Env1, which predominantly controls the volume and amplitude of our patch. Set the Decay pot to a value of 36, the Sustain pot to 68 and finally the Release pot to 31.

8 We have to make some very similar tweaks to Env2; set the Decay pot to a value of 38, the Sustain pot to 20 and finally the Release pot to 33. Env2 is modulating the filter in this configuration, and having a separate envelope at hand to do so, is always useful.

9 On the original, the bass sound does change as it also employs a high-pass filter alongside a low-pass filter. We don’t have the capacity on our ZebraCM plugin to use two filters at once, but we can create the effect with a heavily rolled off EQ. Add heavy compression, to complete the picture.