Rush - Tom Sawyer Bass Growl | Tutorial with Korg Minilogue, No Talking

Published on Sep 16, 2018 Anodyne Institute

"What's happening here?

We adjust our First Oscillator to be a number of octaves lower than its default pitch. We introduce Oscillator Two an octave above the first, barely mixing it in so that it doesn't overwhelm the deep bass of the first. We slightly detune the second oscillator to add subtle animation and fluffiness.

We switch from Polyphonic mode to Unison mode. All of the oscillators are now stacked for one massive voice. We again slightly detune all of these oscillators, using the contextual Voice Mode Depth knob, for more animation and fluffiness. (This is caused by all of these waveforms subtly cancelling each other out at different points, creating more of a bass 'pad' than a solid bass tone.)

We move on to the filter. We use the filter in 2-pole mode, for a wider range of resonance and preservation of bass; the 4-pole filter can cut out bass frequencies at higher resonance because the curve is so steep. (Plus we think that Rush used an Oberheim OB-X for this sound, and it uses a 2-pole filter as well!) We add resonance to the filter, set our 'target cutoff frequency' manually, then add the modulation envelope's contribution to the filter. This automates the signature filter sweep so that we don't need to play it by hand.

The length of the decay on the filter envelope and how deeply it is applied, combined with the resonance amount and the fuzzy unison voice, are some of the most key ingredients here.

Finally, we add echo from the delay section. Using the high pass filter on the echoes is very useful in preventing such thick bass frequencies from getting muddy, and the repeats (feedback amount) really accentuate the filter sweep.

We fine-tune some of these key parameters: resonance, envelope decay length, envelope modulation depth. *We initially made the attack of the filter envelope a little too long and it produces a sharp, liquid pop.* Welp, now you have the opportunity to do better!

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The Anodyne Institute is a fictional place. We would like to make all of the sounds."