sub bass help

[sine143]

hey guys, so I'm still pretty new to producing dubstep. I post this song because it has a specific sub bass line I want to kind of replicate. The track I'm working on is a lot more ambient, so I dont want to really use a lot of midrange growl, mostly I'm just interested in the "womp oscillation". not really wobble... just this pressure that kinda compresses your chest.

I love to double drop this tune because the bass does a really good job at pressurizing a room. The bass line I want to replicate is most prevalent around 1:50.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ04B...feature=search

[Fatlimey]

Sounds to me like a constant sinewave around 30-60Hz but gated against an LFO on a quarter note. The trick to making it sound percussive is to use a soft knee on the gate so you don't clip the sinewave too harshly and add clicks.

So a sinewave gated against a smoothed off square wave. The other trick used here is to play the subbass pulse offset by a 16th after the bassline note. Got to admit it does the business, messing with your sense of balance over headphones.

[sine143]

Right now I'm using the performance stepper in massive to control filter frequency cutoff. At first I was just using the lfo, but its pretty obvious its going to take some more work than that.

I've got a decent thump now, but obviously its still not up to par. I'll play around with it more in the morning.

I've still got to figure out where I actually want to go with this tune... I've got percussion down alright, still needs tweaking, and a good ambient intro/backing track.

[cielomobile]

There are a lot of ways to achieve this.

A sine wave has only one frequency, no harmonics, so if you mess with the filter you're only messing with the volume, as there is only one frequency to filter...make sense?

So one way to do it is attach an LFO to the volume or filter (doesn't matter which, but filters have features like resonance which can change the sound a bit if you're looking for that). You can copy the LFO automation of the main bassline so the two line up. Play with different wave forms to get the sound you want...sine wave is the most common, but other waves will have slightly different sounds.

The gate would work too I guess; I've never done that.

You can also have an amp envelope with a short to medium attack, that will get you a sort of chest-pounding effect. I did that with my last dubstep track, my bootleg of "Be." I like this method because you can very specifically control how long the attack and decay are. Then you could add an LFO with on top of that, with a little delay before it starts, to add some movement to the subbass.

[sine143]

As of right now, I'm using a straight sine wave, centered mono, along with the daft filter in massive. Instead of using an lfo, I use the performer to adjust the filter freq. I've introduced some noise, to add a little space when its not... womping. it seems to be working alright, but I'm still working on it. I just have to figure out how to integrate this into my main sub bass line without it sounding like a 3 legged dog.