How To Make a Growl Bass in Native Instruments FM8

With this FM8 tutorial we welcome back one of our very own community members to present for a second time on the site. This time Trey, who is all of 13 years old by the way, shows you how he goes about making this cool growl bass patch.

These tutorials from Trey should be an inspiration for a lot of you out there, because if he can figure this stuff out easy enough with only a few years if music making experience, then it means that FM8 is not too complicated or daunting for you to master yourself. One more thing that his videos have going for him is that they are guaranteed to not be over anyone’s head in regards to technical terminology or overly complicated procedures. So let’s dive into this sound and see what he’s put together.

He begins with the FM Matrix and explains how the main routing of the Operators is set up. It’s easy to see that’s trying to talk through this part of sound design in FM8 is not an easy task. So we will let the pictures speak for themselves and simply recommend that you pause the video and copy the settings if you are wanting to follow along and replicate the sounds yourself. Needless to say that it takes several waveforms and plenty of feedback and creative routing ideas to make this sound what it is.

One you have the basic sound set, you can move on to the Master window where the number of voices needs to be increased to a total of 3. The Detune parameter is also increased a little bit. The Portamento feature is also turned on at this point to allow for gliding between notes.

The magic of this sound all comes from the Pitch Envelope. You can access this feature on the Expert Pitch window and need to apply the envelope curve to your sound by turning up the Amplitude Envelope knob until you find the right amount for your particular project. Once this is done, you can hear the effects of the changes you make to the envelope as you move along in your programming.

The next step is to add effects. Something that is often overlooked in many of the features throughout FM8 are the factory presets, which can save you a lot of time and keep you moving forward in your sound design. With things so compartmentalized in FM8, it can be easy to find yourself sidetracked and/or distracted. So making good use of these time savers is key. You can choose a set of effects, for instance, from a preset option and then simply make small tweaks to customize it to your needs. In this example he ends up using some Overdrive, a Tube Amp and a Cabinet to give the sound some serious crunch and distortion.

The rest of this sound actually happens outside of FM8. You cam play around with different third-party plugins, as well as those that come with your DAW to make this sound your own. If you have a request for a specific kind of sound to be deconstructed in a future post, please let us know by shooting us a quick message. Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
OhmLab