Make Crazy Bass Sounds With Ringmodulation

This week is going to be a bit of a heavy one, let’s create some bass sounds with ringmodulation!

Ringmodulation is a feature that has been in synthesizer for a long time, dating back to the oldest modular synths.

It is a technique where two sounds get multiplied with each other leaving only the sum and the difference of the two sounds.

This often results in a metallic like sound, and its great for bells and percussive material.
It gets it name because the circuit used to combine these oscillators looked like a ring.

There are more useful things to do than just making bell sounds though, so today we discover how to enhance our bass sounds.
By choosing two oscillators and using the ringmodule to combine them we get more movement into our sounds, which is great for Drum and Bass or Dubstep bass sounds.

The ringmodule doesn’t have a panel with controls, instead you use the parameters on the oscillator that feeds to the side chain of the ringmodule.
You can use the tuning, the feedback and even the oscillator effects to completely change the sound and sculpt it to your liking.

After that I used a mix module to combine the dry sound with the ring modulated sound and I’ve set up a LFO to control this mix for us.
The next step is to use some filters to get even more movement, I used a bandpass filter and a peak filter.
The peak filter is basically an EQ band with a narrow Q, which I modulated to get some resonance sweeps.
As second filter I used the bandpass to give it some extra spice and color.

Once all that is set up you can use the X&Y pads to get even more variation and movement, record this MIDI automation and then bounce your sound down to audio.

Now the real fun starts, you can reverse this audio, stretch it, grain it, make it twice as long and cut out the parts that you like.
You could even throw it in a sampler to get some different options again!

I think you will like these ideas and it is definitely great for getting some unexpected results!

Have fun with these ideas and let me know when you find some cool new tricks!

– Jorgalad