Morphing Bass Sounds In Razor

Razor has some pretty unique envelopes, let’s use those to create some moving and interesting bass sounds!

The first step for this sound is to open up two oscillators, a pulse width and a numbered pitch-bend. Inside this module the pitch of the oscillator is not altered at all.

The pseudo pitch-bend is achieved by special filtering: Partials that are near to partials of a pitch-bended copy of the oscillator are let through.

This can result in nice moving sounds without making them to dissonant.

The pulse width is just a square wave with a variable ratio in the upper en lower levels of the wave.

These two oscillators go through the lowpass and the multimode filter.

I’ve used a lot of modulation on the lowpass filter to make this sound more playable and more versatile.

Setting up macros and keyboard assignments, such as aftertouch and velocity, can really make your sound come to life.

It allows you to make the sound more fitting to the style and the melody you are playing in.
Even if you are not a great keyboard player this is still good practice, you can always write the MIDI messages in your DAW to get a more dynamic and interesting sound.

I also used an external LFO for this patch, you can find those on the back-end of Razor, just go into edit mode by clicking on the wrench in the upper left corner and right click there to insert modules.

After that it is just a matter of finding the right parameter to assign the LFO to, this can be a little bit of trial and error since they have descriptive names sometimes.

This is not always a problem though because you can end up with different results then intended, which makes for unexpected and often cool sounds.

Don’t forget to use a bit of compression and limiting for this sound, it can really push it forward into to your mix, providing you with that nice low end.

The safe bass is also a good candidate for low end, if programmed correctly you’ve got your sub bass right there!

Have fun, experiment!
– Jor