If you want a more thorough play with phase distortion synthesis, that's a great free synth called digits. www.extentofthejam.com/ It's made by the guy from the Groovy DSP channel , he has some great phase distortion lessons on his channel. www.youtube.com/@groovydsp1716 Also thanks to those who pointed out that Junos's could not detune! I forgot. They did it with chorus and / or pwm.
I will take it upon myself to speak for everyone when I say, I want to see ANY knowledge drop you have about pretty much everything. lol. From old school synth keyboards, to history, to neat tidbits, to merits and flaws, etc. So yes, please and thank you, for this and all the things.
another belting video.. tried to look this up recently and wasn't satisfied with the answers I got, so thanks a million.. and hearing gunman was the icing on the cake
While it's not "proper" to the original sound, to mitigate the issue of reese basses mentioned in the end of this video, I recently found that using the 3rd oscillator as a sine wave to make the low ejd of the bass sound, and having the two saw waves (with their low end filtered out) works well, particularly because Vital has two filters in the oscillator section of the synth. So there's still the "beating" effect, but the low end maintains solidified.
@@hippyhobo6285 yep, and if you actually edit the waveform of the detuned saws and remove the fundamental rather than using a filter it’s super clean 👌
That Reese Bass from La Roux - In For The Kill (Skream Remix) really is incredible; it's so naughty, sounds like pure filth! 😈Thank you for making these presets downloadable, I'm so pleased! 🙌 Legendary content as always! 👌
Really solid tutorial again, thank you for this. Always learn something new and practical about Vital in your videos. I completely agree with the point about filtering low frequency Reeses and adding a separate sub.
no, seriously, I've been doing techno for 30 years but you are a treasure trove of knowledge and skill and the best thing is: the passion shines through. Again: thank you.
I always appreciate the brief history lessons and shout outs to all these artists who made my favourite tracks, I have a very eclectic taste in music but I'm a lazy appreciator, I never know who's who or who did what.. I know I know ... ItsShameful, I shall not go beat one off for a week
Also a nice way to make reese basses is to modulate pulse width or phase offset of a second oscilator, by keytracked LFO. That way you can create reeses with a stable phase and nice low end.
casio cz is a very interesting one. You hear this on many old school house tracks (dj duke's unreleased grooves vol.4 p.ex.) also other sounds are very relevant today
Dude your videos are always so top notch and informative and well-explained with great examples and fun! I regularly send your stuff to my friends who are seasoned producers all the way to just starting learning. If you’re looking to grow your audience faster you should definitely think about chopping up these mainline youtube vids onto your instagram and tiktok! You’ve already got the content and i think the added effort of making shortform edits of these vids would pay off greatly. So many people would find your stuff that way when they wouldn’t otherwise!!
Thanks. Yes I was shown an AI app that did a decent job chopping up my vids . It's just time there's only me and my manager. I've started but I don't think I'll release them until I can schedule a years worth campaign. Growth doesn't happen unless you're consistent after all.
Damn good content, would love if you broke down more future garage like Vacant style, or Hardwave / Wave Trap like Skeler, also yes to Phase Distortion Synthesis!
Easy hack to keep the low octave stable: Draw out the low octave from the wavetable in Vital from the reese part and have the second/third osc to be just the low octave. In Serum one can use the sub osc for that. Btw, Casio VSTi comes in Arturia pack and have noticed that pretty much nobody is using it. It sounds great and is different! Sound design without the filter is refreshing.
Yes you lose the beating artifact from that frequency when drawing it out though. It still needs to be there so you can distort it. Drawing out fundamentals is more convenient definitely but loses the reason you would make these (Imo)
i was about to make a similar comment! serum has an option to just strait up remove the fundamental from the wave table so you dont have to do it manually but ive never checked if vital has the same function.
I've always done this sort of bass on a pro-1, with a big handful of PWM on one oscillator; this way you don't have any of the out-of-tune part of the effect & you can control the wobble better. matter of taste, but I have always heard this as a PWM effect myself, & that's maybe more consistent with its origin as a phase-mod.
He's said all of them at some point I don't think he remembers tbh. I wouldn't haha! But they all had the same engine, just different editing capabilities so I didn't need to worry for the video thankfully. There's also a good free synth called digits by a phase distortion expert from the RU-vid channel called groovy DSP. I learned a lot from him.
in Vital you can use a keytracked LFO modulating the phase of the oscillator to do phase modulation -- then you can use a linear sloped LFO to change how the waveform is scanned through. you can't really emulate the full dynamic syncing but you can definitely do a fixed value if you know the gradient you're looking for ahead of time
@@Bthelick I dunno anymore, but it was about mixing and mastering music and I don't remember if it was in r/edmproduction or r/dnbproduction subreddit. But you were definetly mentioned. I dug a bit into it and didn't find it.
Worth sayin that analog synths have free-running oscillators; so the waveform does not retrigger when you play a note; and every hit will sound different .. like using an LFO free-running instead of bpm sync'd will result in the LFO being in a different place every time you play it through.. digital synths; and your soft-synth sound here; have the waveforms retriggered with note-on, so the 'beating' is the same every time you trigger a note... Most soft synths have this as an option on the oscillators; osc retrig on/off. Sampling a bass sound ofc means it will be the same every time you trigger it too, and has a different sound when played up/down the keyboard; as the sample is being sped up or slowed down; so the beating is timed relative to the pitch; and the length of the sample is half/double on octaves etc.
Yes, good point but most modern soft synths do have free running oscs too now. Vital certainly does you have to manually turn that off of you want them locked. I think it's been happening since native instruments massive, I can't remember about serum but I presume it has also. The casino CZ wasn't analog though remember!
A lot of people used to use Akai samplers and would sample. One shot bass Which would naturally speed up as you went up the keyboard when looped on the sampler As well The poor man’s Reese 😂
I'm glad you mentioned that the early producers simply sampled the Reese bass. In a sense, that will always be the most authentic way to make a Reese; why spend hours tweaking synth parameters trying to get your version to have all the same character as the original, when you can do precisely what those early jungle producers did and just sample it from the source? And like that other commenter mentioned, a lot of the character of the Reese (and the Dred bass, and the donk) comes from the varying speed of modulation you get from playing back a sample at different pitches. Not to mention that nice vintage sampler aliasing...
Yup. Although, technically the "original character" is lost when sampling if the playback is at any pitch other than the original pitch of the sample. But like you say, other artifacts are 'gained' like the loop repeat and aliasing. Question is though, how was the detune beating and how much was the loop?
@@Bthelick You absolutely do from the upper harmonics created. This method simply retains a fundamental with no phasing issues, and is quite common to do. You can also do this with Vital btw.
@PaulEubanks I already did! Years ago. But to entertain your confidence (despite the simple audio science!) I just checked. It doesn't work. Think about it, , how can you get the beats of the interference pattern (eg. 6.5hz) when those frequencies are no longer present. You are left with the beat between the next harmonic up or the sub oscillator and the first harmonic. They are not the same at all and they sound completely different. With or without distortion. Distortion is closer because that also highlights upper beats which are present in both but the fundamental beat is missing (of course!)
Would love to hear a breakdown on phase distortion. As a hobby producer I'm familiar with additive/subtractive and PWM but never heard of PD. Would be cool to learn about!
I have Arturia´s Plugin-Version and love playing arounnd in it. Theres some ganrly bass sounds to stumble across. But understanding how it really works sure would be delightful
hey any good sample pack you can point me to or if you have one that would be cool as well? on a side note love this vid, thank you for all the hard work you put in always appreciate your teaching. ;^)
It's not so much about "good samples", , good samples don't exist, only good contexts. And the skill is recognizing the context. Every sample pack I've ever owned the same thing happens , you find a couple of samples you like and go back to when you're in a rush, and then 90% of it never gets used. Fast forward 15 years and you've got a folder full of "kick17" and "clap classic" from who knows where. Also if you're asking for bass samples, I would never recommend any, samples once pitched lose quality so I would always suggest a synth. It's more an ear training thing. If you reference properly, and reference a lot more (see my 3 Rs video) you will start to develop the listening skill to recognize where sounds fit (including existing ones) and if you didn't already have one then you get the 'aural target' in your mind's ear to go searching. For example I might have a track that has a prominent lead or bass sound taking up lots of mid frequencies, and I notice if I choose a clap in isolation when I drop it in the track it sounds nothing like it sounded when I auditioned it solo. So instead I have to second guess samples , maybe choosing longer ones that might be more noticeable behind the lead (of the back beat is important of course) and playing the track back whilst dropping those in until one works. I can't recommend any particular packs but I can recommend thousands of packs via a service like splice. I hate subscription services usually, I don't even have Netflix but I do think Splice is tremendous value, and it helps me make music so much faster. I usually find what I need on there in the first couple of pages. Also because it defaults to sorting by "popular" , if you still didn't have the ears for it yet , you can be pretty sure most of the top entries are of a decent 'quality' and do the job. But always bare in mind now , don't worry about achieving this mystical "pro" sound anymore, because AI has cloned that already and there's 800,000 tracks with the 'best' clap on them. So why not pick sometime that's not 'quality' and be different and stand out? Look at PAWSA, top of the beat port charts, and sounds like it was made in 1986. You telling me those drums, sounds, or that that mix is "quality" ?
Yes I can see why you would think that. Lots of things cause phase shift like the delay effects you mention, but those just add time shifted copies back to the original, that's completely different to phase distortion synthesis. In that, the playback position of the waveform start is modifiable via a separate sync'd transform wave.
@@Bthelick i have some 40 year old synths still but sold my expensive synth (Synclavier/Farlights's). I tend to use Modular most of the time these days
It's the built in Ableton 909 one. I might have pitched it down a semi tone. It did need a little snap to get it closer to the record so I used a compressor with a very late attack into a saturator to catch that extra spike.
Thank you very much, this is highly interesting. What I tend to do is filtering the lows out and..... ok, now in the second that I am typing this, you are actually suggesting this exact technique. On another topic, can you make sense out of Original Dodger & Shakka - Find Space? The Chords and the notes played drive me crazy. I have extracted the vocal to remix the song and it just does not make sense. I cannot find fitting chords. The internet says G minor, unlikely. There is a halftone step directly after the first chord. Phrygian scale? .... no... or is it? The next halftone step is way too close. Then the next issue. When looking at the chord loop, the first 3/4 of the loop is filled with one chord each quarter, in the last remaining quarter, there seems to be the first 3 chords again played very quickly one after another, but with extra notes? I tried to analyse it, to get the notes played, I marked them on the keyboard but nothing makes sense anymore. Haaaaalp!
Hi Bthelick, I can’t remember the name of one of your videos. You did a video about how to create a hopeful feeling progression. I think it was a 1637 profession. Do you know what video I am talking about?
@@Bthelick it's like my go too for pretty much everything now. I love how you can link all the controls. Specially like to manipulate the sound wave in the oscillators or using the LFO to control the filter. If you can think it you can make it, so powerful.
Only for convenience. It's just so I could hear more of the 'usable range' up to that point and it's easier than trying to get it to land on 30% when testing.
Yes that's why I used "bend" at the end. But the Casio did it differently. It used other waves as transfer curves to 'bend' the playback position of the main wave. It also then does a weird sine harmonic hard sync thing to mimic filter resonance too. Very cool engine
I've always heard that Phase Modulation and Frequency Modulation are essentially the same thing (to the point that a number of classic FM synths, such as the DX-7 and siblings, are actually implemented using PM under the hood for performance reasons). Do you know how much truth there is to this, and what differences actually exist between the two methods either in the results or the way you approach creating sounds with them?
Yes it depends on the specific synth's implementation of FM. But they are not the same. frequency modulation is more like a frequency multiplication, whereas phase modulation is a change of the wave playback position (phase) via a different transfer function (in the form of a phase sync'd wave) Very hard to describe in text. I think the channel "Groovy DSP" does a good video explanation if you want to dive into it.
That's not a Reese, well there might be one underneath but if you are referring to the sound in the breaks? that's a higher saw pad synth playing power chords (notes 1+5) and pulsing with volume into distortion, not beating from detunes (you can hear it doesn't change speed with pitch, which means it's coming from lfo modulation, set to 8ths)
I wish. But the music and videos take all my time right now. Eventually there will be a course, and at the top level I plan to do an in-person bootcamp / retreat kind of session.
Via the bend wave distortion mode. Technically most of those modes in vital can be argued to be phase distortion, it just so happens the "bend" type is quite similar to one of the first modes on the casio. The other modes aren't similar to anything the Casio does though.
@@IanEnkema yes you will be able to achieve similar if not exact. it's just dependant on what modes of wave warping it implements (I can't remember sry). If you want to play around with true phase distortion though there's a free plug-in called digits I linked it in the pinned comment.
@@Bthelick it has fm, rm, am, which i assume aren’t being used, though fm is really phase mod, and then theres the asym, bend, sync, quantize, probably a few i am missing, and then theres the remap tool to draw in your own distortion. Do you know which one would be applicable? Also, Kilohearts has a phase distortion plugin to play around with as well.
Ok Ray Keith was definitely huge. I would say that Pulp Fiction by Alex Reece also made the bass popular though it probably wasn't entirely the original sound. However, they were both on the same label.
I think I saw some method with reese basses on serum to make them "clean", I think it involved going to the wavetable and removing the fundamentals or something, do you know about that, can you comment? I don't blindly trust youtubers like the one who shared the "hack" EDIT: yes, name of the short video is "Why PROs Reese Bass Sounds SO GOOD?" please comment on that
Yes it does work, you can remove the fundamental harmonic in the wavetable editor, but you lose the beating artifact. Whereas If you create the artifact, distort it to make it audible higher up, then hp filter after the fact you can get both. The downside to the latter is needing to move the filter if the part moves notes really far.
@@Bthelick okay, thank you! personally I don't mind it because I like reeses, anjuna type stuff music so any technical stuff I don't want to think much about, but it's interesting to learn ofc
You can re-introduce that beating artifact with a very low frequency (like sub 1 hz) sine wave pushed into distortion with the other reese oscillatory, using the IMD concept to use that sine wave as a LFO modulated by pitch to move with the bassline. It can be a bit tricky but is a really fun way to reintroduce movement into a bass patch (or any patch, really). You will have to adjust the amplitude/frequency to taste, similar to adjusting the detune on voices
@jecoeur yes that'll work but audible or not you'll still have to filter it out post distortion as that will take up a huge amount of headroom from the master track!
The modern Reese methods like the first few examples don't sound right to me.. too clean, too clicky. The "Casio" version sounds filthy like it's supposed to.
