Making a Super Heavy FM8 Buzz Bass

For just about every modern genre of music, there is a harder sub genre. And this FM8 buzz bass can fit right in to many of them, from hard house and tech music to drum n’ bass and rock. It’s an easy one to make and a lot of fun to play with outside of FM8 with further processing. It does well with several types of distortion and can really come alive with the right kind of amp modeling. Let’s see how it’s made.

Starting off in the FM Matrix, this FM8 buzz bass gets its nice phasing effect from the differences in pitch values amongst the operators. Notice that the key sync feature is enable on all of the active operators for this sound. This helps ensure a consistent delivery and even development. Operator X (Noise and Saturation) is mainly being used for a saturation boost, while Operator Z (Filter) is providing a small amount of shaping. Operators B-E are modulating Operator F.

Making a few changes on the Master window will begin to really bring this FM8 buzz bass to life. The synth is set to run in Mono mode and the total number of Unison Voices is increased to seven. The Detune and Pan features are used to spread out the sound and provide more depth. And some Analog and Digital Quality are added to provide interest and character.

The only Effects used in the making of this FM8 buzz bass are an Overdrive unit to introduce a small amount of drive, and EQ units which finish shaping the sound.

Here is a small audio sample of this FM8 buzz bass in action. No processing has been applied outside of FM8.

Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
OhmLab