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8. Crafting a gritty wavetable bass patch

1 Modulating wavetables can create seriously aggressive bass sounds. We’ve loaded up NI Massive, turned on all three oscillators and chosen a gritty waveform for each – Chrome, Dirty Throat and Screamer. We’ve pitched Osc 2 down one octave to add some low-end beef, and changed the Intensity mode on each oscillator to Bend -/+ to allow for some noisy modulation later.

2 Distortion will add aggression to the patch, so we’ve selected Tele Tube in the FX1 section then cranked the Dry/Wet dial to 50% and Drive up to max. This type of patch benefits from some unison voice stacking and some stereo spread, so head to the Voicing section and change Unisono to 6 to stack up layers, then spread things out by switching Pan Position On and dragging the slider to the far left.

3 We only want to use one filter, so move the +F2 slider in the filter section right to the top. In the Filter 1 section, we’ve selected Band reject filter to scoop out the sound, and set Bandwidth and Resonance to 12 o'clock. Finally, we’ve assigned one of Massive’s macro controls to the filter Cutoff and each oscillator’s Intensity dial. Try experimenting with wavetable positions and modulation amounts.