I will now start a series about the learning processes that I did during the new album. I hope it's not too boring and nerdy for most of you, but that's the kind of information I would have liked to read in interviews with other bands, but could never find. And even if it is probably too nerdy for most of you, there may be some who make music themselves or think about it and find such information inspiring - the others can just skipp it
Right at the beginning it was clear to me that this time I would give the bass line a more important role. While on "Nullify" the bass line almost always only produced a deep layer sound, which served as the bass basis for the song, but had no rhythmic function, I wanted to use the bass line as a rhythm instrument on the new album. This decision made numerous other changes necessary, because a bass line with a rhythmic function must sound different from a pure bass layer.
As in all previous albums, I initially produced almost all sounds with the sawtooth wave. This waveform is my absolute favorite sound of all other waveforms (sine, pulse, triangle) and can also be used in many ways. I've always used it for the bass line too - but "naked" waveforms always sound sterile and thin. It was therefore always necessary to make these waves thicker with effects like "Chorus" (for this I always used the Chorus from Reaktor, with very extreme settings). As fat and powerful as this chorus made the bass line, it also made it unclear. This lack of clarity was not a problem before, because the bass sound as a simple layer did not need any particular clarity, but should simply produce bass frequencies.
When this unclearness began to bother me more and more, I thought about how I can remedy this. I started listening to other bass sounds and analyzing finished bass lines from other synths. When I researched the standard bass sound of other Synths, I could see that it was not just a sawtooth wave, but also a pulse wave that was heard 1 octave below the sawtooth wave. For me it was very important to realize that the same two waves sound completely different depending on the phase difference they have to one another, and that I was able to produce a new bass sound that sounded pretty fat even without the chorus effect - i realised that 2 wave shapes can realy melt to one sound if the phase is set right. I still use the chorus effect for this, but to a much lesser extent and only for the higher areas (more on this in a later post).
This newer, more precise sound also makes working with the bass lines more flexible for me. With the new songs there will be something like 2 parallel bass lines throughout. One will be very low and go down to the sub-bass frequencies that the human ear can just hear, a second will still be low but not reach those frequencies. So far I've only had the kind of polyphony in the higher ranges, but not in the bass line, because low frequencies are much more problematic for mixing than high ones.
