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1. Neurofunk bass synthesis with Xfer Records Serum
1 We’ll be using Xfer’s Serum for this walkthrough (the demo is available at xferrecords.com) but these techniques can also be applied to other wavetable synths such as NI’s Massive. Start by setting your DAW’s BPM to 174 before importing Backing.wav and Growl.wav from the Tutorial Files folder. The growl we’ve imported has been made to fill the gaps in the main bassline, adding variety.
2 Add Serum on a fresh instrument or MIDI track, triggered with Bass.mid. This MIDI pattern has shorter notes an octave above the main low notes, and we can use portamento to make Serum glide between those notes instead of playing them together: hit the Mono button in the Voicing tab to disable polyphony, and set the Portamento time to 250ms, giving us the gliding effect we’re after.
3 Let’s choose a suitable wavetable: Basic_Mdc includes a number of waveforms that can be modulated between to add movement – and excite the processing we’ll apply in a later walkthrough. Choose it for Oscillator A. Disable Osc 1’s RandPhase to make its waveform retrigger consistently, then turn on the Sub Oscillator (top-left) and choose the RoundRect wave to add low weight.
4 Modulating Oscillator A’s wavetable position will add some movement – set its WT Pos dial to 42, and assign LFO1 to modulate it (drag the LFO’s handle to the WT parameter) with the Amount up to 55. Next, we’ll shape the modulation by clicking LFO1’s folder icon and setting the shape to Gunshot, for a more complex shape than a typical sine or sawtooth wave, giving more interesting modulation.
5 We can make the modulation a bit slower by changing the timing to 2 bar – after this, hit LFO1’s Trig button to make it retrigger with each note. Now, we’ll modulate the Sub’s volume using LFO1, to give the whole sound a similar movement: push its Level up to 100%, and assign LFO1 to it at -40. Next, we’ll use Serum’s oscillator warping to add more interest to our sound.
6 Pull down Oscillator A’s Warp menu and select Mirror, turning the waveform into a symmetrical image of itself, adding harmonics and extra crunch. Now use an ADSR envelope to modulate the Warp control by assigning Env2 to it at +100. We can slow the modulation by increasing Env2’s Attack to 1.7s, adding movement to our sound that’ll react well to further processing.