CREATING BASS DIVE EFFECT IN FM8

Bass dive effects can act as a great surprise and can have very powerful effect on the dance floor.

They are used in almost any electronic dance music genre and are quite easy to make since its really just a sine wave swept in pitch.

As always, we will use F operator as our main carrier.

First let’s adjust the F operator’s envelope so we won’t hear any clicks during the initial stage of the sound and also to slowly fade the it in the end.

Bass dive usually doesn’t have very high pitch drop, but it drops in pitch slowly so it’s heavy low frequencies are more pronounced during this effect.

Go to the pitch envelope section. We will use it as a pitch sweep for carrier F.

Set the global pitch envelope modulation amount to it’s highest value.

We have two options here.

If we want for our bass dive to start from a certain note and then go lower in pitch, we set the pitch envelope like this:

If we want for our bass dive to dive to a certain specific note, then we set envelope like this:

This can be very important if we want to start the bass dive from a certain root note we have main bass line in or we want to drop the bass dive sound to the fundamental note in which we have our bass line in.

I will work with the first option for the purpose of this tutorial.

So set a fairly low 4 bar long in your midi track.

Set the pitch envelope to slowly dive from its base frequency to target low frequencies. You can set the target frequency of our bass dive:

Here we go, we have created a basic bass dive effect.

Again, nothing really spectacular but it has it’s uses.

[audio:https://www.fm8tutorials.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Bass-Dive-Sample1.mp3|titles=Bass Dive Sample1]

If we want a bit dirtier bass drop raise the amount of self-moudlation of operator F.

Set it to 30. You can hear something that sounds similar to filtered saw wave.

[audio:https://www.fm8tutorials.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Bass-Dive-Sample2.mp3|titles=Bass Dive Sample2]

Now try raising the self-modulation amount to 50.

[audio:https://www.fm8tutorials.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Bass-Dive-Sample3.mp3|titles=Bass Dive Sample3]

To make thing a bit more interesting we can add another carrier.

Activate the operator E, set it’s audio output to 100.

Again, set it’s amplitude envelope like we did with operator F so we avoid any clicks and we also have a nice fadeout at the end.

Set the ratio of operator E to 2. We doubled the bass dive sound one octave higher which add more definition and meat to it.

[audio:https://www.fm8tutorials.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Bass-Dive-Sample4.mp3|titles=Bass Dive Sample4]

Activate operator D. Set it’s ratio to 64 and it’s amplitude envelope like in the picture below. Apply very, very small modulation amount to operator E.

I have set it to value of 3.

This acts as a small ornament and it further pronounces the pitch falling effect. You can also set similar small modulation amount to operator F.

[audio:https://www.fm8tutorials.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Bass-Dive-Sample5.mp3|titles=Bass Dive Sample5]

Now set operator E to modulate operator D to 71. This gives a bit different effect.

Try setting it also to full 100 amount.

[audio:https://www.fm8tutorials.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Bass-Dive-Sample6.mp3|titles=Bass Dive Sample6]

Try also changing the pitch envelope so it slowly raises to fundamental frequency and the again drops. This way you can get some good and interesting transitional effects.

I have also lowered the audio out of our second carrier E.

[audio:https://www.fm8tutorials.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Bass-Dive-Sample7.mp3|titles=Bass Dive Sample7]

Another cool thing to do is to use digital effect found in master section of FM8 synth.

Also I recommend using low shelf EQ to limit the low frequencies.

Here is how that sounds:

[audio:https://www.fm8tutorials.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Bass-Dive-Sample8.mp3|titles=Bass Dive Sample8]