Chill Out With an FM8 Detroit House Bass

In this tutorial learn how to make a FM8 Detroit house bass. It’s an easy sound to make that works great with House, Chillout and even Garage.

We recently got a few requests to do a tutorial on how to make a FM8 Detroit house bass as well as a Massive one (see that tutorial HERE) and after doing this sound in both synths, I think it’s easier to get it done in FM8.

Making a FM8 Detroit house bass is pretty straightforward. The surprising part was that it took so much modulation between operators to get the sound how it needed to be. There are a few key things to remember. First, make sure you pitch operator F up to 1.5. That really helps make the sound have a level of thickness and brings out more bass. Second, the envelopes. You need to vary your envelopes with this sound. I found that if every envelope has the same ADSR, it makes the sound flat and dull. Figuring out which operator is contributing the most bass to your sound or which operator is adding the top end is really helpful because you can then control how much attack, decay and sustain you hear. For a chill house bass like this one, I didn’t want a lot of the bass to sustain because it would muddy up a mix. I was able to control that via an envelope. Finally, the peak and shelving EQ’s are really helpful in polishing up the sound.

Thanks for watching!

Cheers,

Echo Sound Works