Hi! I’m Francois.
If you’ve been following me for a while you might know that I enjoy learning about sound design by reverse engineering tracks from artists that I like.
Casper Koman is an artist I really like. I listen to a lot of his music and I like his style which is sort of spherical, but also very intelligent and groovy. He’s paying a lot of attention to details and it’s also great to listen to from a producer’s perspective. It was quite a challenge to sit down and remake his work as there are many layers to listen to carefully and try to figure out how he’s done it.
In this section here I’m remaking a part of his track:
Let’s take a look at the main bass sound:
It’s done with Xfer Serum using one of the PML Serum Techno Preset Patches called BA Spitfire. It consists of two oscillators, the sub oscillator and the noise generator.
We have “Basic Mg” playing in Oscillator A, pitched down by two octaves. Then there’s a square wave in Oscillator B pitched down one octave.
As for the filter, we have the German Lowpass on top, achieving this a bit “blocky” feeling here.
We are modulating the wavetable position of Oscillator A with the LFO - which is what creates this “rising” type feeling. Oscillator A is also used as an input for the FM modulation here in Oscillator B - so we are kind of rendering that movement on top of the square wave.
We need a bit of delay on top and we need some saturation. I used FabFilter Saturn here with a setting “Synth Bass Clipper” - it already nicely opens up the sound. I’m also using Decapitator - this analog modelled saturator, adding some crisp to the high frequencies.
If I mess around with the wavetable position while we’re playing, we also get a cool effect:
That’s it! Short session here, but a great sound in my opinion.
I hope to see you next time!
- Francois