Making complex bass design with DN

Elektron Gear Digitone/Digitone Keys
#1

Do people manage to modern bass design like Tipper, Skrillex, Symbolico on the DN?

I know these types of basses often rely on heavy processing, but after watching a AHEE tutorial on the sound design of the latest Skrillex album, my mind opened up to how much you can do with FM and additive synthesis instead of trenching sounds in effects. I might be impatient, but I’ve so far not succeeded in getting the same results. I don’t know where I got the idea that the DN has a noise oscillator from, but apparently it doesn’t, and noise is crucial to getting that breathy, distorted sound of a lof of today’s bass music (bass, neuro, drum&bass, dubstep). I know FM can get very noisy, but what I’ve played with so far sounds to harmonic and screechy.

Something like the sounds happening at the drop here around 0:40:

Or something like this from my own track (around 5:07):

I’m also looking to create sounds a bit more complicated, like in this track around 2:41

Wondering if I made the wrong purchase here… Are there better options for bass design (I’m looking at you, Hydrasynth and Minifreak)…

Cheers,
Chris

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#2

The DN does have noise, that’s what feedback is essentially. You can get pure noise by cancelling out the oscillator with the feedback, then increasing the feedback gives you noise. Personally I love the DN for Bass. It’s just about taking the time to learn the sound design techniques for what you’re trying to produce. Stick with it, you’ll get there.

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#3

You absolutely can get those complex bass tones from it.

One thing that really helps is creating patches across 2 tracks - one with the low end growl and the other with all the high frequency movement, unison and chorus

Feedback adds loads of noise and you can bring that out even more with the overdrive

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#4

There it is, instanty! Thank you man!

Yeah, I’ve been dabling with FM for quite some time, but my results are still mostly from luck and exploration at least with harmonically rich stuff. I’ll give myself a few weeks for now.

Cheers!

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#5

Great point. I’ve been reluctant to accept that a lot of todays sounds (almost everything?) is done with layering, for the mere fact that it’s been tedious for me to program the MIDI, especially when your sounds use portamento and pitch bends; getting the movement of everything to sync up. Any tips / nice tricks for this on the DN? could for example a MIDI track be used to sequence multiple layers? Also, do I remember wrong, or can the MIDI tracks’ LFO’s be used to control the DN’s internal tracks?

#6

I personally find bass patches to be the most tricky to get right in general.
havent tried designing neuro things on DN but from my experience it seems possible.
judging from the examples youve given im gonna say that its going to be challenge to program all the worbly transitions because DN lacks parameter slides (only p-locks, which are stepped). So if you want to design tracks inside the machine without bouncing sounds into a daw, be prepared to create multiple patches of the same sound that have different LFO settings, ect. (one main sound and 1 or 2 worbly variations of it)

yes midi loopback is possible, also: https://www.elektronauts.com/t/digitone-tips-and-tricks/

#8

Since I’m using Ableton and OB; I guess I can just automate that then.

Thank you!
And apparently there’s a “Layering” function in the Voice menu! Have to look into this.

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