Creating the Reptilians bass sound in FM8

Noisia’s collaboration with Mefjus and Hybris has a huge bass sound. Martijn shows us how it’s made…

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“Most of the bass sounds have been made in FM8. It’s a pretty basic technique but I like the ‘human’ quality of it – it’s like it’s almost talking.”

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“The main sound is basically just FM8 using a couple of operators – sine waves being frequency modulated. You make the sound by looping one of the main modulators. The character of the track is made by having several instances of FM8 with different loop ranges and slightly different processing on each sound.”

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“To make the sound from scratch, I just experiment with different waveforms for the modulation part until I’ve a good bass sound. Once I have that sound, I like to fuck it up!”

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“There’s a whole bunch of other things you could use, but I like using iZotope Trash as it’s really hands-on. You split the sounds into three bands and then I’ll generally just try out different kinds of distortion on each band.”

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“For this particular bass sound we also added a little bit of short reverb [using Valhalla Room] before the distortion, which you can then automate in time too.”

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“There was an EQ on every instance of the sound too, just to make sure there were no muddy, super low frequencies going on.”