BLACK SUN EMPIRE

How to update the Reese bass cm252

Black Sun Empire are Micha Heyboer, Milan Heyboer and Rene Verdult, and when it comes to chunky neurofunk, their Blackout Music NL is one of the biggest labels around, with releases from the trio themselves, alongside the likes of June Miller, Neonlight, Gridlok, Phace, and BSE’s padawan Pythius, also known as Hylke Klazema. Here’s how they updated the classic Reese sound for their track Scarif…

“When we started out the track, we were just trying it out with a normal, classic type of Reese. We tried that for a long time; we spent way too much time on that,” Hylke admits “That didn’t really work out, so we decided to go for a more modern sound that was a bit more digital; sounding a bit more like now, but still trying to retain the feel of an old-school DnB Reese.”

Although the Reese is predominantly made of synth patches run ‘live’, the track does include a sampled synth later. “If you put it in a Reese in a sampler, you get a lot of the movement from it being resampled: you get a small sample and loop it, and that will give you movement,” says Milan. “It’s one of the other sounds resampled just to give it an extra layer of dirt when the switch hits,” adds Hylke. “When the switch happens in the track, we throw out all the arpeggios, so we need something to fill that space up, to grab the listener’s focus and get them back into the track... and more filth works in this track!”

Black Sun Empire & Pythius are all about energetic arrangements, so after the drop, they switch up the bassline to keep things interesting. “The bass sound itself and the bass melody is more predominant there, as it needs to carry the track – you can’t just have a straight F all the time!” notes Milan. “We resampled one of the bass sounds and processed it even further, which gives it an extra layer of dirt on top,” says Hylke. He demonstrates how they gave the resampled Reese a unison effect in Kontakt, and the output of the sampler is then run through Fluid, distorted with D16 Devastor, ducked with LFOTool, distorted again more lightly with another Devastor, and modulated more with D16 Fazortan. “By putting on a layer like that you can dirty it up a lot!” Hylke grins.