Creating a simple Progressive Psytrance square-wave bass sound
There are lots of variations of the square-wave bass, let’s look at some tips and tricks for creating your own.
Some of the most important characteristics to getting a solid Progressive Psytrance square-wave bass sound are finding the right waveform, plugin or synth, getting the melody and overall progression perfect – with note overlaps in just the right places – unfortunately there is no real formula for this, just keep tweaking to perfection! Finally finding the optimal Portamento or Glide setting for the overlapped notes.
In terms of the progression and arrangement of the notes, a trick I like to use quite often is to build a “Master Loop”, I’ll spend some time fine-tuning the perfect progression, and then break it down into sections and play with the smaller blocks, re-arranging them into several new loops. The smaller the sections/loops are, the more pace will be added to the track.
As usual, xFer Serum is a great option here as it has a huge variety of waveforms to choose from, you can go with the default square wave (In Basic Shapes) however I found the sound of the Square wave in “Basic Wrd” to be more pleasant to my ears.
And onto the effects and processing…
Then we add the usual envelope onto the filter, remember to make sure legato is enabled so that the notes don’t retrigger the filter’s envelope when they’re gliding. When using a note progression that has a lot of varying notes, specifically that range more than an octave, it can help to apply some key-tracking to the filter, although let’s invert it so that when the notes go high the filter goes low.
Often, I have found when working with square-wave bass sounds, that I use a lot less processing on the sound. That is up to taste, you could add saturation if you want, it’s up to you.
For a more in-depth walkthrough, check out the video here:
