Synthesising monstrous ‘wobs’

Xfer Records’ Serum is Mustafa’s go-to synth for making his trademark big, bad bass sounds. Here’s how he does it…

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Starting out with Serum’s initial saw-based patch, Mustafa activates the low-pass filter and modulates it with an envelope, tweaking the attack and release curves of the envelope to get an aggressive feel. The Filter’s Drive and Fatness get a rough and ready sound.

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Mustafa heads to Serum’s FX page next, activating the Compressor in Multiband mode and turning up the Gain to achieve a suitable amount of loudness. “It’s instant fatness, basically! You can automate the top, mid and low bands, which is nice,” he enthuses.

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To make the sound more complex, the second oscillator is activated and set to one of Mustafa’s custom wavetables. He sweeps the Wavetable Position knob to find a suitably filthy tone, and makes the oscillator sound even richer by turning up its Unison voices and tweaking the Detune and Blend knobs to taste.

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In order to control the sound’s overall stereo width, Mustafa turns down the Unison Width. A chorus effect is added next, and Mustafa turns its Mix and Low Pass Filter knobs to max, then fine-tunes the Delay and Depth knobs.

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Once Mustafa has the chorus sounding the way he wants it, he dials the dry sound back in with the Mix knob. Next a Distortion effect is added after the Chorus and before the Compressor, and Mustafa pumps up the Drive level to make the sound even grittier.

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To process Serum’s output, Mustafa uses JST’s Gain Reduction, turning up the Gain knob to saturate the sound. Reverb comes courtesy of ValhallaDSP’s ValhallaRoom, with its lowest frequencies rolled off.