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Reinforcing Bass Guitar with Sub Destroyer

Um the next thing I want to show you is how to go about um reinforcing your bass track with me now I have a plug in that I designed it's called sub destroyer and it's basically just ah lo it's focused on low end it's a synthesizer and you could do like bass drops and stuff like this you can do stuff like but you can also control it with midi so the concept here is we want our low end of our base to be perfect but we also want the high end to be real and I know there's a lot of people out there that use program base the problem with that is you can never really it's it's hard to get it to sound like a human plato base so you get the best of both worlds by using um a mini trach to control low end and then you just remove the low end from your actual based track and then just keep like the the mid frequencies in the high frequencies and then you just go through and programme exactly what you played so here's an example so you can tell it's it's less articulate you can't tell one note from...

the next but when it's low and it doesn't matter because you've got the hyeon tracked that's gonna dio articulating so I'm gonna just play it one more time and I'll show you with subject store coming in and out party no let's also compare it with the real bass. All right, so here's what? The sub story based and then here's with the real bass not as powerful, I think would you agree? Especially you getto that debt to take the debt that hits way harder or the sub destroyer? Yes. So this is just one of the tricks that we use like in my productions in order to make everything as powerful as possible. I like to program the low end you could do. It was a lot of different there's, a variety of different synthesizers that you could use. You could even take a program based, for example, and program the whole song and then just keep only the low end a portion of the program days and combine it with your real base. But I like to use sign ways because they're a little bit more pure and you can also, you know, there's there's, various harmonics and things that you can add. For example, in my plug in we have a drive section that you can add, like distortion and stuff. Ah, and then we also have harmonic enhancement uh, which allows you to kind of make some of your lower frequencies more parent on smaller speaker systems. I can show you that because he wants deeper and thought the other one has more like mid range that's really useful for you know, making your if you've got a really low tuning and you want to make your base more apparent like in a laptop or and headphones or something um you use this and it gets the job done pretty pretty clear clearly um all right, so I mean that's pretty much it for base I think wei have any questions? Yeah, marcel wants to know how often do you change based drinks when you're recording? Um it's definitely different from guitar bass strings are a lot more expensive but you know, I think we would probably do it maybe two or three times in a whole record so try to do three or four songs on one set of strings now if you're dealing with a lot of different tunings than obviously, you have to change the strings each time you change the tuning because you're gonna have a different strain gauge so he does have to be aware of that marty wants to know do you pan both based tracks or just blend them okay, so no painting at all and that's all straight up that's a good point um pretty much the way that I do base is always mono er I think based sounds kind of weird stereo or like if you maybe if you're doing some kind of special effect like chorus or flander type thing, my makes sense but the idea of bases that it should be center you should have the same amount of basin you're right speakers you do in your left speaker and you basically do that by keeping everything that has to do is base one hundred percent mano a cz muchas possible awesome how would you program ah base slides or ticks with sub destroyer good question um so there is a part on here where the base actually begins to bend and it's right here it's just a slight bend and on the sub destroyer we have so all it really is is that you're continuing to play the string like that and as you're playing it your bending the string so we used the pitch bend articulation so once you go into the pitch band articulation you can actually draw you know pitch bends like this and subjects order will pay attention to those and I program that in because I knew that that was played in there ah we have another one where there's a baseline at the end sounds like this that's the real one and then the sub destroy one so we just went in and drew baseline the thing that's really cool about q basis that it has these various shape tools that you can use teo draw different uh automation is and things like that it's got triangles and various things like that so uh you can use the parabolic tool which gives us a nice bassline that you hear there you can also uh you can select something after you've drawn drawn it and you can like change the shape of it by using these little modifiers here and there's all kinds of different ways that you can affect it do you question yeah um I actually had a couple questions particularly is sub destroyer of e s t or in our task plug in or what so it's available in all formats but it's an instrument plug in so it doesn't work like that like a processor you don't send sound through it it's you either use the buttons on the plug in itself like two triggered bass drops for example like this or you send me to it and then the midi tells it what to perform um and also do you ever use the sub destroyer anything for ah like pumping up the bass drum at all or anything like that? Yeah, I could actually show you how to do that too if you like uh please. So one thing that's really cool. How you could do a sub destroyer is if you want your bass drum to be in a certain key you can do that so you would just load up some destroyer and then you would try and find the lowest note that fits within the key of your song so we'll just say it's gonna b c so you got probably that one because this one can't really hear that one very well and it's probably a super low frequency so let's say I like that one I can go in and actually draw a little kick drum I think that um and then I just slip this section so the longer you make these the more base will have right? And you can just you don't have to use the grand you could just, like, make any size you want whatever feels right and then what you would do is you would combine that with, um like with a kick sound so let me just loaded and kicks out real quick uh, let's see if I could actually find a kick sound something in here somewhere we're all right, let me, uh I'll grab one from drum agog. All right, so you would just do a high pass on the kick on an ad in your sub destroyer and then you can actually change you can change the key of the kick, and then you would be able tio go into sub destroyer and we have all these various tools that you can use you could change like the wave shape if you experiment with different sounds that creates like that now, could you, uh, run like a trigger as a mano instrument through sub historia is the sub destroyer itself like on ly an instrument so yeah it's only an instrument however, if you don't like working with middie, there is a way tio automate the same thing so we have automation mode and you can actually just move this knob right here to change the frequency and next to the frequency we have the musical note that it's equivalent to so if you're like at fifty hurts that's equivalent to a g and then when you press the button it plays a g like that right? So you could go in and just like hit right mode on your automation hit play and then like click it and now when I opened my automation page I can see that button press that I did say that and then what you could do is you khun take basically take one of those and like copying pacing around like this and then every time it passes over one it plays one like that so you could basically do the same thing that we just did with the midi but now we're doing it with automation instead and then you can like copy and paste it like that you get same same deal it could change the length like this very yeah how often do you use this in your own production all the time? Yeah that's why I actually made the plug in so I could make it easier for myself to do it because I was doing it the old fashioned way which is like getting out of sine wave generator and then making the sine wave and then printing it and then like cutting it all up and fading and changing the length and so now that just have automation and middie control it's like way easier to work with and the cool thing is that if you do use the mini mode you can select all of those many notes like in your whole song and change each one's length which is nice um do you change velocities for midi bases at all one hundred twenty seven oh yeah um you do you know it just depends on what you're trying to do on this particular song in this particular example pretty much every note is just full on velocity but you're going to come into some scenarios where you want to actually play around with the volume of each note and try to match what the what the performance was especially when your programming the low end but I like the low and to be pretty much see like almost to the ceiling you know what I mean just because uh I want I want my low into not fluctuate I don't want to flap around you know I wanted to just be steady um do you put the pick attack on the grid for base but the transient for the guitar on the grid right is that what you're doing? Um, I like to make him the same. Ok. Yeah. So pick attack before. Yeah, before. And if you look at what he played, you should be able to see that. Um, I know what we have isn't perfect, but you can see like this pic attack here if I zoom in a lot it's actually before the beat. I feel like it's late if it comes after the beat. But it depends on the tempo of this song. Is that two o six ish to afford to a six so it's fast. And so it makes sense for the pick attack to actually be in front of the beat, I think. But on slower songs that might make it sound early, so you might want to put it behind the beat. Got it? Um, can you side chain the kick track into a sub destroyer for wants to know that you side chain kick track? I don't think so. No, because we tried to make it more of an instrument. Right? Then we did a processor. That might be a good idea for update someday. Yeah, yeah, try it.