Making a Nastier Screaming Bass Synth in NI Massive

If you are on the hunt for a seriously harsh and scary synth for one of your productions look no further. This screaming bass synth tutorial for NI Massive will knock your socks off!

There are several genres of music these days that you can use incredibly harsh sounds in, and your fans will beg for more. The more extreme the better, it seems. So if it’s a screaming bass synth you want, you just found it. This quick lesson shares a few tips that you can begin using in your own sound design sessions right away to achieve more biting and freaky sounds that will up the fear factor a few notches for your next release. It all comes down to choosing the right wavetables, the right effects and then the right modulation assignments to accentuate all the right elements.

First, I have picked a few wavetables that will be good for this example. A Chrome wavetable is loaded into OSC1 with the pitch dropped one octave. A Sonic wavetable is loaded into OSC2 with the pitch dropped two octaves. And a Deep Throat wavetable is loaded into OSC3 with the pitch dropped one octave. Notice that I have not offset any of the pitch values, this is so we keep as clean a sound as possible in the beginning. We need clarity in this screaming bass synth at its core, or it will quickly get too messy to use, and it will not work well with processing and effects later on. Also take note that each oscillator is routed directly to Filter1.

Here on the Filter panel, we set it to run in Serial mode, rather than the default Parallel mode. The filter output is also set fully to Filter2. This way our sound passes through a Lowpass filter before being processed by the Scream filter. This is the first real step of making this screaming bass synth scream.

The total number of Unison Voices is increased to three, and the synth has been set to run in Monorotate mode on the Voicing tab The voices are them spread out just a touch via the Pitch Cutoff and Pan Position features for extra width and a bit of phasing, adding more character to this screaming bass synth.

A Brauner Tube Amp is loaded into FZ1 for some drive and grit, while a Dimension Expander is loaded into FX2 to make it sound bigger. The EQ is turned on and used to further shape this screaming bass synth.

A touch of Brown Noise and Feedback are added for character.

A Sine Shaper insert effect is used to enhance the distortion brought on by the Brauner Tube Amp, and a Hardclipper insert effect is used to provide more roughness and grit.

Below is the Routing Schematic for this screaming bass synth.

Now we need to set up a Modulation Envelope and the Main Amp Envelope. They need to have similar settings on both the Attack and Release parameters to work well together.

Here are the Modulation Envelope assignments for the oscillators and the filters. This envelope now controls multiple parameters at once, providing a consistent delivery and exposing just the right amount of madness in this screaming bass synth.

Below is a short audio sample of this screaming bass synth in action. No processing of any kind has been applied outside of NI Massive.

Cheers,
OhmLab