Designing Bass

Time to stop learning knobs and start cooking with them. Bass is the best place to begin because the recipes are strict, a bass has one job: be felt. Load the SB-1 below and build each of these from the Init preset.

Recipe 1, Sub bass (the invisible foundation): Osc 1 sine, Osc 2 off, cutoff wide open, fast attack, full sustain. That's it, a sub is a sine played low. Its power comes from what it doesn't have: no harmonics to clutter the mix.

Recipe 2, Growly analog bass: Osc 1 saw, Osc 2 square one octave down at ~70%, cutoff down to ~300 Hz, resonance ~3, filter Env Amt ~30% so every note barks open, sustain high, and a touch of Drive. Play low keys, instant vintage.

Recipe 3, Wobble: start from Recipe 2, then LFO → Filt, rate ~4 Hz, depth ~70%. Play a low note and hold it. Now drag the LFO rate live for the classic drop move.

Waveform · time

Spectrum · frequency

VCO-1

80 %

Level

3 vox

Unison

0 %

Noise

Out

SB-1

VCO-2

80 %

Level

14 ct

Detune

Octave

Out

SB-1

VCF

1.2 kHz

Cutoff

1.0

Reso

15 %

Env Amt

In A

In B

Out

SB-1

ENV / VCA

1.1 s

Attack

600 ms

Decay

85 %

Sustain

1.8 s

Release

Out

SB-1

LFO

0.4 Hz

Rate

25 %

Depth

Out

SB-1

FX & OUT

0 %

Drive

450 ms

Time

45 %

Feedbk

40 %

Mix

75 %

Volume

Main

SB-1

Octave

0 ms

Glide

Keys: A–L white, W E T Y U O black · Hold latches notes so you can tweak knobs while a chord rings · Shift-drag a knob for fine control

The golden rule of bass: keep it mono-ish and keep it simple, skip big detune and long delay (notice those recipes leave Osc 2 detune near 0 and Mix low). Width and echo smear the low end; a great bass is a tight, dry punch.

Checkpoint

Why does a sub bass use a sine wave rather than a saw?