Speaker 1: Hello, this is Bunting, and if your basses suck, and are garbage, and are kind of worthless like this, you're in the right place. I'll show you how to make them a little saucier like this, maybe just add a bit of extra oomph to something like this, or even clean up your wubs. Oh, beautiful. And as a bonus, I'll also show you some kind of intro-y pad arrangements, how to get those a lot cleaner. If you want to gain instant access to this whole project file, all these presets I've made in it, plus some bonus post-processing racks I'll throw in, those will all be posted on the Patreon, if you like me enough to support me there. Plus if you like me extra much, go check out my new song. Yeah, I would appreciate the support on that, and I hope you like it. So let me demonstrate what not to do with this intentionally atrocious bass. The first mistake people often make is right here. You want your notes to be in the zero range, because that's where the bassy range is. But before we worry about the post-processing, let's remove it, and it might even sound a little better, right? And let's go in Vital and show you where the fatness begins. People have a misconception that post-processing will make or break your sound. It can, but the initial patch has a bigger effect. And in this initial patch, things you have to watch out for is FM and wavetables, right? So already, without that FM, it sounds a little nicer. But with these wavetables, if you listen here, there's a lot of high end, a lot of them sound kind of washy. They can be interesting, but for the fattest sound, you want to find a wavetable with a lot of this mid-range. You can generally see it just from this kind of general roundish, squarish shape. You can hear it, right? It sounds a little fatter than the rest. And if you look through this wavetable, you'll see that it has a lot of nicer harmonics in this low range versus, yeah, something like this, right? It looks a lot thinner, and the harmonics and the sound, yeah. Of course, you can go with the old reliable basic shapes. They'll always do you right. But for now, let's just stick with this wavetable and mess with it, right? I know you bro-step guys, you love FM. It's your favorite thing ever, but it sucks. No, it doesn't suck. Just be careful with how you're using it and how much you have. Because if we have these high amounts of FM, where did the beef go? It's all gone. It's all shifted to the high end, and it is flying away, never to be seen again, okay? For a nice middle ground, if you really like how the FM sounds, maybe just turn down the amounts just a bit, have the octave a bit lower. And sometimes it helps to have simpler, more basic shapes, especially with FM.

Speaker 2: Let's hear it. Yeah.

Speaker 1: But for right now, just to show off more post-processing, let's go back to the clicky robot, sure, and show some effects. Now hopefully you haven't made any mistakes in the voice now that I told you. Now let's fix your garbage effects. The first thing you have to watch out for is stuff like this high pass, right? What's happening, it creates this cool wow wow vocally effect, but it's cutting out a lot of that low mid range. So to reintroduce that, we'll go back to our voice, get a sine wave for a sub bass, and direct it out so it's not being processed. And it's fat again. Okay. The next thing I see people do, they want cool sounds so they click every effect ever and they love it. But no, don't do that. You can have plenty of effects, but generally, see, without the flanger, already sounding a little fatter. And when you are using these effects, be careful of how much movement there is. A lot of times, if you want to use this phaser, turn it to mono, right, have it in this lower mid range, gets a lot fatter. You can have it wherever, and really use whatever tone you want, just be mindful what basses do what in your arrangement. You want a fat boy, you want a screechy boy, you want a weeb, it's up to you, I'm just trying to get a fat sound, okay? And let's say you really do like this movement effect, I would just turn the mix down a bit. So you can still hear it, it's just not removing much of the beef. Okay. The next thing that's important and can make or break a sound is the distortion, right? It's obviously sounds huge and slammed, if that's what you want, go for it. But the sweet spot with a lot of these post-processing effects is right to the point where you hear it crunching up, just dial it back. So it's nice and loud, full, but not too crispy. And of course, we have our multiband, right? I like to turn up this attack and release, and maybe you can turn back the release just a bit, but these settings generally make it the cleanest. Now this is standard stuff, the post-processing will complicate things though. Okay, so in post, what you don't want to do is anything at all. There's plenty of things you can do, and oftentimes what people do is they have saturation. But just like our distortion in Vital, right? You want to push it to where it breaks and dial it back just a bit. As a good visual, you want to push it to where it's just peaking over this, for the fattest kind of sound. Another thing that's kind of slept on is this bass. When it's down, it lets you push it even further without as much crunchiness coming through. But how about we just leave it at that. Nice middle ground. It's all about the middle ground here. Now when people add OTTs, they do it willy nilly, and it sucks. Even if I turn up the output, it's still not that good. A lot of times, the mistake made is they just slam on OTTs without really tweaking it, and it sounds artifact-y and unclean. One way to make it cleaner is to turn up this time. You see me do this a lot. You see, a lot messier versus a lot cleaner. And you can reach a nice middle ground here, depending on what sound you're using. If it's still too messy, you can turn down this amount, a little less in there. How about just a little, like halfway. And if you really want, you can duplicate it. But two of these kind of halfway OTTs sound a lot cleaner than even one full way OTT. So yes, OTT isn't evil, you just got to finesse it a little bit. Now a big thing I see a lot of newbies doing is they EQ the heck out of their sounds. What is this? It sounds better without it. If you want to EQ things, generally what I do is I would just, well, grab an EQ. Not 42, we don't need the answers right now. But I generally kind of scoop this mid-range and just boost a bit of the high end. Except this bass doesn't really need it, because the OTTs already took care of a lot of that. Generally, you want to avoid curves like this, especially big scoops, because it might be harsh here, but you don't need that much. You can just kind of keep it a bit less steep, and we still have that high end presence. Or we can even make it super narrow and cut out just that specific frequency. So generally, just be a bit cleaner. And as a safety measure, let's say you have this curve, and you're like, all right, it sounds good. Look, just turn this scale back a bit, and it kind of smooths it out. And be sure, in all your steps, cross-reference it. Try a bunch of different things. Compare one EQ to another side-by-side, like which sounds better. Surprisingly, I think this sounds a little better. Kind of compensating for a bit of that presence. But do not go crazy on the EQ. OK, so already, that is so much fuller than our initial bass, if you were to skip back. Just because we used everything in moderation, we made sure to not push it past its breaking point. We dialed it back right on that middle line. But let's say we wanted a bit more polish on the sounds. The first thing to do to get sounds a bit fuller is to throw on some stereo widening. I like to use Wider. It's free. It's by Polyverse. And you could just drag this up. Lots of stereo. For whatever reason, people love a lot of stereo. But I think your sound can end up sounding fatter with just a moderate, like, 50%-ish amount. At a certain point, it sounds too wide, too chorus-y. And it takes away from that mono fatness, which is going to slap on a sound system. Another thing to polish up our stereo field is just grab an EQ here. And we can put it on mid-side mode. So at mid-side mode, it separates the mids and the sides. So this mono signal, we can just hear it, and just our middle of ears, and then stereo signal side on the side of our ears. For the extra polish, you can just go to the side, a bit of a mid-scoop, top-boost can add to some extra clarity out of the stereo field and just crispness. And then, of course, on the end of any chain, you generally want a limiter or a glue compressor or a soft-clipping ray. So we can just turn off this soft-clip. And you see, oh, no, it's in the red. It's scary. It's going to be harder to mix down. But with the soft-clip, we can push the volume, and it will not clip this, thus making it easier to mix in the long run. Alternatively, and this depends on the sound, you can just grab a limiter here. Now, limiters, I find they work better with clean sounds like wubs, while other sounds like grittier sounds like this are fine with a bit of kind of distortion. There's not really any reason to go into the red, even though I do sometimes as a treat. But what going into the red does, I mean, it's clipping, right? And you might as well get more control over how it's going to clip using soft-clipping or any plug-in like that or a limiter. Now, this is the general formula for post-processing. Again, it's all about that middle ground. Experiment with it. You'll gain more feel for it. But where is the secret sauce? And I'll tell you. The first secret sauce ingredient is this phaser. So already, right? And what this is doing, it's kind of just adding some more harmonic interest, fullness, to these low-mid frequencies here, right? It's kind of just like EQ. And really just find a place you like it. We can even put it before our effects. Experiment with different positions and see where you like it. So I put it right before these OTTs, maybe change the poles. And that's clean. That's especially useful if you really like the timbre of a sound, but it's just lacking that sense of fullness. It's in that low-mid range with the phaser. Now, one that's a little more fun is this kind of disperser. So let's look up disperser, right? Boom. Sure, the bunting stock disperser. It's the same as anyone. You see some artists use this. But generally, they use this kilohertz disperser, which costs money. And who wants to spend money? Yeah, but this is very similar. In fact, I often go for the stock disperser instead of this kilohertz. And as you can see, it's not rocket science. Let's actually hear it. Yeah. So essentially, this kind of changes where the frequencies kind of hone into, and the disperser is just like messing with the phases, makes it all bubbly and lasery. Now, to make this yourself, all you have to do is grab an EQ3. Let's put it in a group. Let's open this macro and map this to macro one. And then we duplicate a million zillion times as much as you want. And look, just like that, it's a disperser. And it sounds bubbly and saucy. And it makes a more interesting texture on your sound. It kind of smooths out some overly grittiness, makes it lasery, and it's just fat and beautiful. Do I need to explain? OK. So for one final piece of secret sauce, sometime it's nice to just get this erosion kind of on hiss mode. You hear that a lot on some more hollow sounds. But if we put it out before a lot of our effects here, let me just cut it and put it here, if it ever loads. Yeah, so we put it before this. We can increase the width a bit and decrease the amount. And on some sounds, it sounds really fat. I don't think this is the best sound for it. But sometimes layering a noise can just push it that last bit of fullness and kind of fill out those frequencies. And the final tippy-dippy top, like the topping of the cake or whatever, overdrive. Overdrive, it's just another distortion, except you're able to kind of hone it in on specific frequencies. So let's just turn down the distortion a little bit. And you hear already, it's kind of crisping up the top end, just the hair. Really, I just like it for that extra bit of high-end crispness and clarity if, like, OTT multiband isn't always cutting it. But yeah, that is the general formula for post-processing, starting from sound design. So you can make sure your sounds are as fat as the pros or whatever gimmick I want to say. But let me just kind of give you a little bit of a sneak peek or whatever gimmick I want to say. But let me just go over these different sounds so you can see the kind of processing I did. This is literally just a saw wave. You know, OTT is not super crisp. But with this disperser here, it's phaser in the low-mid range and disperser at the end becomes just obese. It's really that simple, right? And also, I use this bass trick, makes you able to get a lot fatter. And I mentioned the mid-scoop here. I just use a notch filter for this. You can hear how much fatter this dramatic mid-scoop is making it before this distortion. You know, mid-range tends to get very tricky with this kind of stuff. So experiment with that. Now, for you wub lovers out there, I know there's a lot of you. You see this in my videos. But keep in mind, when you're adding these OTTs, generally, you want to turn the time up so you don't get so many artifacts, you know, if you like a cleaner sound. Another thing to mess with, and this is another bit of secret sauce, is instead of OTTs, a lot of times I use this multiband compression preset. I call it OTT light. But let me turn that off. And multiband compression preset, you can literally just look up compression and multiband compression, right? It's OTT light, basically. It's still going to compress the sound, but a lot more gently leads to a lot less artifacts. It's really nice on cleaner sounds like wubs and the likes. Now, another place I use this multiband trick was, well, here. And you see, this is what lame pad processing looks like if it actually works. Wait, that wasn't the right one. Whoops. OTT, it sucks. You see, people make this mistake of putting OTT on their kind of pad elements if this actually plays. What the heck is this? OK, so OTT on the pad, especially with reverb, is a no-no, right? Let's hear it without it. Sounds a lot cleaner. Versus this, it's artifact-y and weird. You can turn down the amount of it, turn up the time per usual. But what I did to make this one a lot cleaner at the bottom is I decided to use this multiband instead and some EQ. Before the post-processing, though, I went into the sound design and changed something. So generally, a cleaner mix, it's not just the post-processing. It's not just the mix down. Just arranging mindfully, such as adding some lower oscillators and cutting out the high end with a low pass, leaves more room for stuff like this little arpeggio to sit there beautifully. And then post-processing afterwards, multiband compression just adds that extra bit of brightness and oomph without the disgust of OTT. Yuck. And we can even boost this a little, sure. And this EQ, this is my classic EQ, right? It sounds a bit muddy and full. Let's cut out our low end and scoop these mids, boost the highs. So it's a lot more palatable, maybe less full, but a lot cleaner. And I love to do that on all type of lead elements. Here's this synth right here with yucky OTT versus beautiful multiband compression. Oh my gosh. And I think I turned down the reverb just a bit too. Also keep that in mind. And pretty similar EQ curve. We can hear it. Not as big of a difference, but still cleans it up a bit. Of course, I'm going to make some racks out of these kind of processing stuff. And those will be posted on the Patreon, which will be in the description, along with the whole project file, along with all the presets, along with me. I'm going to be on the Patreon. No, I'm not for sale yet. But if you want to get a lesson with me, you can go to BunsenMusic.com. And that's kind of a similar thing. Sample pack's there too, both free and paid and all that, if you want to support me. Check out Flux, whatever. But yeah, either way, I hope this was able to help you hear what kind of fatness in a sound sounds like from the beginning steps of sound design through post-processing, not making any of those newbie mistakes. And yeah, be sure to like if you enjoyed the video. Drop a comment if you have any questions or any suggestions for what you want to see me cover in future videos. And subscribe, because that helps me out. And look, I even have my little infographic. Half of you aren't subscribed. That is crazy. Yeah, and if you want to join a community of a bunch of dudes just like me and just like you, we have a Discord. That's in the description. Everything's in the description. I don't need to say this. I'm sick of it. On that note, thank you so much for watching. Hope you learned, hope you enjoyed, and peace out.