How to Make a Nasty Filtered Glitch Hop Bass in NI Massive

An awesome NI Massive video tutorial from DJ Vespers, showing you how to design a seriously nasty glitch-hop style filtered bass synth from scratch.

DJ Vespers happens to be a certified Ableton Live trainer, so he knows a thing or two about how to make some cool things happen with that particular DAW. So all of you Ableton users out there will be happy to see a bunch of great tips & tricks throughout the lesson. It moves fluidly between sound design and processing, allowing you to see first hand how someone can use the tools available in Ableton to boost the sounds coming out of Massive to a whole new level when they know what they’re doing.

You only need one oscillator running a saw wave to make the bass, but a second instance of Massive is used later on to create a sub bass that mimics the main bassline. You’re reminded that sometimes less is more and the focus of this tutorial will be keeping things simple and allowing the synth to do it’s sonic magic without many effects in play at this point. Switching the synth to Monophonic mode will lets the bass glide between notes, while increasing the voice value to three really fattens things up.And while we are on the Voicing tab, activating and tweaking the Pitch Cutoff and Pan Position features makes this sound a whole lot deeper and wider.

He shows you how to incorporate some sidechain compression in Ableton Live to provide some ducking on the bass when the kick drum hits. And as an added bonus he also shares how to sidechain the bass to the snare compression, too. Now that you have the frequencies back under control, it’s time to start playing with the pitch of this synth. Some automation is programmed to modulate the pitch value of the main oscillator.

He then layers a Bandpass filter and a Daft filter in parallel mode and modulates their respective cutoff parameters to shape the sound before sending them to the FX tabs for a Brauner Tube and a touch of Chorus. A little EQ and some feedback for some to accentuate some choice elements and a Hard Clipper and a Bit Crusher combine to add even more dirt and grit to the bass, perfect for the glitch-hop scene.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this one. If you have a request for a tutorial, let us know by send us a message either here on the website or through our Facebook page. We are always happy to hear form our community members!

Cheers,
OhmLab