Recreating This Bass with a VST Synthesizer

Question

I'm hoping someone can put me in the right direction on what sort of bass this is from this dance track and how I'd go about re-creating it with any synthesizer VST, please. I'm using FL Studio, and I have a few VSTs like Massive/z3ta/Sylenth1 if it makes things easier.

I've got little knowledge when it comes to creating sounds however I assumed it's a basic square wave with some sort of processing to get it sounding like it is, but in my attempts (with the z3ta+ VST in this case) I've got no where near to this sound.

I'm hoping to re-create a close enough sound to it so I can experiment with layering it with some bass samples I have, and to also use the "formula" for this bass as a starting point to make my own derivates from it.

If anyone's curious, this is the song:

• Song: Clear Vu - I Adore
• Remixer: Lee S
• Cat No: 12DJGLOBE337
• Label: All Around The World
• Year: 2004

Answer 1

You can make this quite easily with Massive but it won't sound like this (produced) bass without a lot of EQ and compression.

It sounds somewhere between sawtooth and square to me so just use the default oscillator settings on OSC1 and turn all the rest of OSCs off as you won't need them. Next, go to the OSC page (above 1Env) and click on 'restart via gate'. This is so that every note sounds that same.

After that, set your filters to series and use whichever LPF you prefer. Play the lowest note you're going to use in your track and turn down the cutoff until you can hardly hear it or at the frequency you want the filter after the initial pluck (just before 12 o'clock for C2).

Then assign 1Env to filter 1 cutoff, pull down the sustain level (next to dacay) and bring up the amount until you hit the right brightness during the pluck.

Lastly, go to 4Env and pull down the sustain level to about 9 o'clock or where the sustain sounds more natural for this type of bass.

You should have a bass quite close to that. Now make some A-B comparison and listen for the differences. Firstly the Env->Cutoff amount, then 1Env decay and finally 4Env sustain. Tweaking the cutoff and adding a little bit of resonance could also help come closer to it.

On the eq, it will need a lot of tweaking that will depend on you final settings so I cannot really advise without listening to what you come up with. But I tend to pull down a small band around 450-550Hz to take out the muddiness/woodyness.

On the compressor it will take a lot of hard compression/limiting and it is very usual to side chain the kick drum to create a 'pumping' effect. I prefer to use a second compressor for the side-chaining.