In-Depth Design and Resample of an NI Massive Reese Bass

I still get tons of requests for training on how to design and resample reese styles bass synths and when I stumbled upon this video here, I wanted to share it with the Massive community at large in hopes that it could help some of you out! But it isn’t just how to design a nice NI Massive Reese bass, as it also goes into great detail as to how it is resampled and processed in Logic Pro. You can, of course, use any DAW you like and achieve the same exact results! Since this type of sound has moved beyond Dn’B music and is now commonly heard in various glitch genres and even electro genres, it has become a much more relevant topic for producers and musicians all over the world. The Reese style bass has consistently expanded into new types of music for decades now, and is not going to slow down any time soon. So we hope you enjoy this look at one more way to make it all happen and perhaps it will help you figure out how to make it work in your music, too.

This NI Massive Reese bass starts out with a Lunacy wavetable being loaded into OSC1, with the pitch dropped two octaves. A Scrapyard wavetable is then loaded into OSC2, with the pitch dropped one octave. The next step is to set up an LFO and assign it to modulate the Wt-position and Intensity parameters of OSC2. The synth is then set to run in Monophonic Mode on the Voicing tab and some Glide is added via the OSC tab. Some Phasing is introduced to OSC2 via the Modulation OSC panel. Now, a Sine Shaper and a Parabolic Shaper insert effect are added to the mix. A Flanger+ is loaded into he FX1 tab and a Phaser is loaded into the FX2 tab. This provides more movement and modulation to the sound over time. Finally, the EQ is used to accent the low end and attenuate the high end a bit, and this gives us the main core sound for this NI Massive Reese bass.

Now comes the fun part. It’s time to resample our NI Massive reese bass and make it much more impressive than it is currently. Bounce your sound to audio and add it to your project arrangement. An EQ and Auto Filter are used to shape the sound further and add more movement through modulation automation. Once you have is sounding the way you like it, bounce it again and bring that new audio file into your project arrangement. In this particular example, this version of the sound is actually added to the project twice. The first iteration is drastically filtered and only the high end is left, while the second iteration is processed to provide the low end. Once you have the sound you like, bounce it again and once more bring the new audio file into your project’s arrangement. In this last round of processing our NI Massive Reese bass, some Phase Distortion is applied and a bit of final shaping happens with an EQ unit. Bounce the sound again and you now have a Reese you can use in your final project! Process accordingly and you’re done!

Cheers,
OhmLab