Designing a Glitch-Hop style NI Massive Reese Bass

This tutorial showcases a pretty standard Reese style bass, which is simply attained by detuning two waveforms, and adding some portamento, or glide to them. This particular NI Massive reese bass is very gritty, and with a few additional effects, you can really make it sing (or snarl) the way you want.

To start this NI Massive Reese bass off, set the total number of Unison Voices to 2 on the Voicing tab and add some glide on the OSC tab. A Kangaroo wavetable is loaded into both OSC 1 and OSC2, and tuned down to -36 and -36.5 respectively. This is a standard method for making Reese style bass synths, which adds some nice movement and phasing. On OSC 3 load the Scrap Yard wavetable and drop the pitch to -35.72. The Modulation OSC panel is then used to introduce some phasing to OSC3. Adjust the Phase and Pitch of the Modulation OSC according to taste.

A Lowpass4 filter is loaded into the Filter1 panel and a Band Reject filter is loaded into the Filter2 panel. Our NI Massive Reese bass is routed through these filters in equal measure, but in Serial Mode rather than the default Parallel Mode. Some Macro controls are now assigned to the Filter1 Cutoff and Resonance parameters for easy manipulation. Set the mix of the filters all the way to Mix 2.

Now we can add soem effects to our NI Massive Reese bass. A Tele Tube Amp is loaded into the FX1 tab for some added distortion, and a Dimension Expander is loaded into the FX2 tab to widen the sound. Insert1 is set up with a a Sine Shaper, and Insert2 is a loaded with a Hard Clipper. A Macro control is assigned to control the wet parameter of both Insert Effects and the Tele Tube Amp for easy tweaking later on. Finally, one more Macro control is assigned to the WT-Position of OSC 1, OSC2 and OSC3.

That’s the basics of the synth patch, but to fatten up the sound, you can use EQing, compression and other effects like Flanger and Chorus, and automate those plugins to make your sound more dynamic.

Cheers,
OhmLab