Step by step

5. Aggressive wavetable Reese

1 Wavetable synthesis can easily facilitate the creation of much more gnarly and modern Reese basses. Here in Serum, we use a free-running LFO to modulate Osc 1’s wavetable position. The morphing wavetable oscillator we’ve chosen has a bright, vocal-esque timbre.

2 Once again, we need to detune two oscillators for more of a classic Reese effect, so we duplicate Osc 1 over to Osc 2 (via the Menu » Copy A to B option) and then fine-tune one to -15 and the other to +15. Serum doesn’t copy our LFO modulation to Osc 2, so we set that up for the second oscillator.

3 When triggering sampled Reeses from a sampler, the ‘wobble’ gets faster with higher MIDI notes. To emulate this, we’ll use Serum’s Note modulator to modulate LFO Rate. Now, the higher we play up the keyboard, the faster the wavetable scanning will waver.

4 Just like in our previous tutorials, we blend in Serum’s Sub oscillator for bottom-end weight, and pan out the oscillators to -20L and +20R respectively. This time, we mix in a weird repeating ‘strum’ noise waveform that, when Keytrack is activated, creates an odd buzzing effect that gets slower or faster depending upon the note played.