Designing a Dark and Aggressive NI Massive Dubstep Bass

This lesson showcases a sound that can be easily used in dubstep and some of the harder modern electronic music genres. In fact, this NI Massive dubstep bass is similar to those used by many popular artists on the scene today. It’s a fairly basic approach to this type of bass and can be used as a starting point for other versions to be used in your own productions. So once you have successfully recreated the sound in the video, you can begin experimenting with using different wavetables, filters and effects to really make it your own. You can also get a lot more out of a bass like this one with some basic processing in your DAW of choice after you wrap things up in Massive.

This NI Massive dubstep bass starts out with a Roughmath III wavetable loaded into OSC1, with the pitch value set to -11.92. Then  load a Screamer wavetable into OSC2, with a pitch value of -11.95. Finally, a Digi Cook II wavetable is loaded into OSC3. All three main oscillators are routed directly into Filter1. Now the Modulation OSc panel is set up to introduce some Ring Mod to OSC2 and some Phasing to OSC1

A Hardclipper insert effect is added for grit and distortion. A Parabolic Shaper insert effect is added to help add to the drive and edge of this NI Massive dubstep bass. A Bandpass filter is loaded into the Filter1 panel. A Classic Tube Amp is loaded into the FX1 tab, which delivers some serious drive and distortion. A Flanger- is loaded into the FX2 tab, which brings some nice movement to the sound. The EQ unit is turned on and all four parameters get a little bump to increase the edginess and body of the synth. The total number of unison voices is increased to six, and the synth is set to run in monophonic mode. The Pitch Cutoff feature is used to add even more phasing to the sound. Finally, a Performer is set up and assigned to modulate the Bandwidth parameter of the filter.

Cheers,
OhmLab