Designing an FM8 Fire Hive Bass

This FM8 Fire Hive Bass tutorial shows how to recreate the bass from Fire Hive by Knife Party using FM8 and a few other effects!

In this tutorial we will look at recreating the bass in the song Fire Hive by Knife Party. This FM8 Fire Hive Bass is a quick and simple bass synth that relies heavily on effects outside of FM8. If you wish to recreate the exact baseline, make sure you have a couple of effect plugin’s such as Ohmicide, Camel Crusher, and WOW.

Start the FM8 Fire Hive Bass by activating Operators F, E, D and C. Assign Operator C a Soft Tristate Waveform. In the FM Matrix, set Operator C to fully modulate Operator D, and then D to fully modulate Operator E, and then E to fully Modulate Operator F. Set Operator F to be routed to the Output.

Next, you will want to click on the Master tab of the Navigator pane and change the setting of Polyphony and Unison. Polyphony’s Voices should be raised to 40, and the number of Unison Voices should be raised to 4. Turn the Pan level all the way up, and turn up the Digital Quality level. That’s it for the FM8 portion of this sound. The FM8 Fire Hive Bass relies heavily on effects. You will want to experiment with different effects inside of your DAW if you are looking to recreate the exact sound.