This is how you do moog bass NI

[kensuguro]

Just had to do a proper rendition of the NI demo for whatever their revolution is. All synth parts made with the cheapo free synth that comes with Live. You just gotta play it with a bit more of an attitude man. I'm not sayin' my playing is the ultimate, but you gotta hit the right buttons when it comes to moog bass playing. A lot ground have been covered with it already, and it's a shame not to build on it when claiming a revolution..

NI demo for comparison
https://soundcloud.com/nativeinstrument ... t-teaser-1

Moog bass is not just about the amount of bass you can pump through. It's about controlling your articulation so you take advantage of the filter sweep decay to make short transient bursts almost like a slap bass. But whatever, my entire mix has my sound to it and even a different progression, so it's not apples to apples, but the philosophy behind the playing is totally different.

[kensuguro]

btw, just to recap... if you weren't into this sort of sound, or were wondering.
The irritating lead is an octave saw with flat attack and no decau, with 100% sustain (could have guessed that). There's a pitch modulation that comes in at about 700ms. It's auto in this context, but can be assigned to mod wheel. Key is to exaggerate the pitch mod % a bit, so it wobbles more than what you'd want with a vocal.
The lower lead is a classic saw with a LFO mod cutoff, with a higher resonance. You want the cut off to be at a point where the lead just pin points the base pitch of a vocal. The resonance and LFO modulating is barely enough to make it sound "waw"-ish. More like "wow" ish. (the mod bandwidth is low) Both of these have a bit of legato glide.

The theory behind these types of leads is that it's supposed to behave like a vocal but with more exaggerated vibrato. And notice in the playing there's a lot of pick up notes. Just stick to the dorian minor and put the pick up note 1 note lower than your target note and mostly it should go fine. This is used in lead and also bass. You can apply this to EP parts as well. These pick up notes come on note, and the latter note follows with a slight delay. These will be lost with quantize, so if you quantize, use a lower quantize percentage (60% or so), or use no quantize at all. The leads in this are not quantized at all I think.

For percussion, I guess it's redundant define the delayed clap thing as it's fairly defacto standard.. You just get a bunch clap samples, in this case I just sampled myself. And you follow the snare (on time) with a slight delay. You just recreate a crowd who is clapping slightly behind count. The delay depends on tempo, but you want to have sound like "brrrrat" (with the "b" being snare and "rrrat" being the clap part) So delay it and spread it. You can play it on time with a bit of spread, and then delay the entire clap track to your liking. Musiq Soulchild really took the delaying concept to a new level by applying it to even lead vocals. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol7aX6EKn0w) Notice the drums don't even line up at all. Very loose timing. I think the delaying and laid back groove era of r&b was a great experimentation in looser definition of what constituted a "groove", sadly it was abandoned shortly, towards early 2000s.

anyway, just listing out some of the finer points of achieving the elements that make this sound what it is. I don't think it's too practical in this day and age, but thought I'd write it out just in case you're interested.

[dawman]

Nice, that's how they do it on the Big Jobs 'eh........

[Sounddesigner]

Nice! Yours is definitely the winner.

[kensuguro]

doesn't take much to beat that one.. I think the point is that there's an accumulation of knowledge, experimentation, learnings that make an sound what it is. Moog bass in particular is a combination of the way the sound is made, how it lives within its context, and what it does musically. It's just sad that a lot of that gets tossed away through innovation. Ideas are built on ideas. Sometimes they're totally innoative, but heck, if the demo is of a moog bass, it's telling you right out it's not about ground up innovation. So in which case, they should at least acknowledge what came before, and add to it. And you know what? That just so happens to be what music has been doing over its entire lifetime.

This kind of goes back to the demo thing. A demo tells you a lot about how much the product team knew about what exactly it is they were trying to achieve. Of course, with whatever NI's revolution is, I'm sure their primary goal was not to make the ultimate moog, or to innovate specifically on that front. But it just pisses me off that they put out a demo that told you in your face, that they didn't really know what they were doing with the moog bass, and didn't bother to look a little deeper into it.

I dunno, this whole thing bugs the hell out of me especially because I spent so much time reverse engineering synth basses and bass lines. It's too rich and colorful of a world to squash into something so flat and soul less. Each sound and element that make a genre what it is, or constitutes a particular "feel" of a song is very special. The combination is special, as well as its elements. They're all like a little culture. Like a continent with its own beliefs, value systems, traditions, laws. If it were a country, these things would be celebrated. (or should be, anyway) In contrast, in a low brow fashion these can be boiled down to stereotypical caricatures.. My demo is somewhat of a caricature since it just picks out the most characteristic points of older r&b, but at the very least your caricature needs to evoke the correct stereotype...

[dawman]

Dude have you seen or heard the new hyped up Beats....?

http://www.native-instruments.com/en/sp ... ntent=2431

Maybe the real goal is to make the shittiest demos possible to drive away customers into the 3rd party developers.
I can't possibly think of any other explantion.

But I remember loving the Snare sound NWA got on strait outts Compton. Sounded like a Bucket full of Bee-Bee's getting kicked, and the Guitars were reminiscient of when we have those Tiesco Del Rays, with Norma Amplifiers, unbendable strings, etc.
Somehow it worked great as I love that LP, still consider it a milestone and put rap front and center.
But nowdays, the usual watered down vocal agenda crap with some kids wearing Mr. T starter kits, etc.

[kensuguro]

yes.. supercharging beats definitely involves littering your track with stupid pitch modulated square waves.. Hey look, mario jumping all over the place!