Gorgon City - Ready for your love - FM Bass question!

Question

I am trying to get the bass sound of Gorgon City - Ready for your love.

For me it sounds like a FM Bass so I tried to get it with FM8 by modulating a sine wave with a sine wave with twice the frequency. Then I used envelopes to get them plucky. But I can't get anywhere close to the tonality of gorgon cites bass.

For processing I tried a combination of saturation/distortion, Multiband Compression to accentuate the midrange a bit, small reverb and chorus. But whatever I do it seems like my bass is not strong/interesting enough for a simple Drums + Bass combination

Can you help me getting closer?

Answer 1

Rather than applying FX I think you need to explore the possibilities of FM synthesis to try and get the sound you are after. This will mean moving beyond the basic two operator pair that you describe.

Listening to you sound, two aspects strike me. First, it contains a lot of frequencies and second it has a very resonant quality. In FM you can increase number of frequencies generated by using a Multiple Modulator arrangement where a carrier is fed by two or more modulators. This will allow you to create a huge number of partial frequencies, dependent on your settings.

To get the resonant quality you can use Multiple Carriers, where modulators are connected to multiple carriers and this will allow you combine the frequency responses of each carrier and create formant filter style responses in the frequency domain.

I would also suggest seeing if you can isolate your target sound and then examining it's frequency content (and also time domain). In this was you can then start to build a similar spectrum in FM8.

Answer 2

I think that the bass here is analogue or simulated analogue. It's using a square wave oscillator type. You might have trouble trying to emulate this with an FM synth.