Making a synth sound fat

[MRB Kevin]

any good plug-ins that you guys recommend for making a synth sound fatter?

[grazz16]

i just use Abletons saturators, but there you go anyway :P

[Chrxstxxn]

Another thing you could attempt to do is layering your synths, and learning more about 3D mixing. YouTube the former being "layering synths". Supposedly Hardwell uses Nexus, which is all presets, and you know DJ's of that caliber probably don't rock out too many presets and leave them in the open.

[grazz16]

Yes layering is important as well especially if the sound is thin to begin with. Often i'll layer the sound with a low, mid, maybe a high version, and blend them together to create something that fills out the register a bit more thus making it sound fuller.

[Daily Crisis]

Some good VSTs that are common are Sylenth1, Nexus, DUNE, Massive and Spectrasonics Omnisphere (my personal favourite).

You can look on Equipboard and see what music producers use as their hardware, software and plug-ins.

And also if you want to make a synth sound fatter a very simple VST called Sausage Fattener (developed by Dada Life) is excellent.

[Chrxstxxn]

Don't forget to pan those synths however. You can't have all your shit layered. Check this out, his layering is on point.

[TCMuc]

There's many different ways, and not all require additional plug-ins...

1. If you're not using all the synth's oscillators detune an oscillator by one or two octaves (12/24 semitones) and use it as a sub-oscillator to add some bottom end. If your synth has a dedicated sub-oscillator all the better.

2. Layer your synth with another synth, or simply another instance of the same synth.

3. You can also just take the midi notes of your melody and copy them one or two octaves down (or up) to make it sound fuller. If the only thing affected by velocity is volume, you can use the velocity control to level out the relative volumes of the sounds in the different ovtaves.

4. Adding some chorus might also work for you.

and last but not least


5. Less is more. I know it's tempting to make a synth sound really fat but chances are that if it sounds fat on its own, it's too fat to fit in the mix since it will drown out the other elements.



PS: Allright just had a look at that Sausage Fattener thing.... It looks like it's basically a limiter/compressor with some distortion and maybe some EQ. The waveform in the end of the video looks horrible, so it seems like it mostly works by adding ridiculous amounts of compression to the sound. If you want to use it, do so very carefully and avoid high values of fattnes...

[AllDay]

Don't forget to pan those synths however. You can't have all your shit layered. Check this out, his layering is on point.

You definitely can layer everything! its all about being good with frequencies and reverbs


The only true way to make a sound fat is to resample and layer to your desired PHATNESS. Sometimes tho a synth can sound just right without having to make it sound huge.