The high-level idea here (in case I didn't explain quite clearly enough) is: 1. Our ears are very perceptive to volume over time when it comes to perceived loudness, and therefore 2. If you make sounds in your productions louder for more time on the single-cycle scale (such as in your subs), they will sound perceptibly louder to the human ear at basically no headroom cost!
This is a great video and explanation. Just to add, in case this helps to clarify for people who think similarly to me: Waveforms that spend more time away from 0 have more energy, or power (the sum of the area under the curve, what’s often measured as the “root mean square” or RMS). If you think about a speaker cone, with no power applied to it, it rests at zero. But if you apply power to it (with your finger, or with an electrical current to the speaker driver) it moves away from its zero point. So more powerful waves are pushing or pulling the speaker cone for more time than less powerful waves. And the same thing is true at our ears. Loud sounds spend more time pushing or pulling our eardrums.
If the sub would sound perceivably louder while it’s at 100 on the scope, then it seems like it would have been loudest before any phase was added, is adding the phase just helpful if you want to increase the volume of the upper harmonic? To help reshape it after increasing the volume on the upper harmonic? Thanks!!
@@enneff This is technically true, but "power" in this sense doesn't necessarily translate to audible volume. By your reckoning a 100Hz sine wave has much less power than a waveform of the same amplitude that goes from zero to max and stays there for a minute before dropping back to zero. But you'll only be able to hear the sine wave. The method for making subs is sound but I'm not convinced of the reasoning behind it, I still feel like the increase in perceived loudness is just because you have to add harmonics to change the wave shape, introducing higher frequencies that are naturally perceived as louder than lower frequencies, when played at the same amplitude.
Hi Bill, I'm a huge fan, Denver dojo member, and fellow RUclipsr. I made a similar video last year on sub wave shapes but my hypothesis is very different, though correllated. I'm really curious what you think. ruclips.net/video/tAcoLUidQUw/видео.html You talk about loudness as the amount of time spent at full scale away from the zero-crossing. IMy hypothesis is that loudness is not that, but something directly correlated to that: it is how steep the wave is (and thus how much force the speaker cone moves with) as it goes from -1 in to +1 out. Distort a sine wave and it'll be all the way out/in more of the time, but it also becomes steeper and pushes the air in the speaker cone out at you faster. If loudness were just being away from 0, then a DC offset at full scale would be loud. Instead what we have is higher frequency sounds are louder at the same amplitude (they push/pull faster and more often) and the equal loudness curve is downward sloping. I also think it is important for subs to have more time to gather air into the vacuum created as the speaker cone is sucked in for longer before it thrusts out the collected air. More air actually gets accumulated and then pushed out with more force. Interestingly, a rounded sine's shape does just this intuitively, but it also has all the odd harmonics in phase so they all push and pull together with the fundamental. Anyway, please let me know what you think. Also, try the cableguys waveshaper for subs, you'll love it.
The shape of the waveform doesn't really have anything to do with perceived loudness. Make an experiment: Play a 50 Hz square wave. That's as "loud" as a sound can be. Actually the term is crest factor - it's how much the RMS of the signal is close to the peak level. For a square wave the two are identical. Now apply an allowed filter (or a phasers with no LFO and all wet - as that's the same thing). They will sound identical, and be just as loud. Now inspect the waveform of the allpassed version. Wacky, eh? The thing is: the harmonic content is exactly the same between the two, the only thing different is that harmonics are shifted in phase (delayed) by different amounts in the allpassed version. Our ears register sound in the frequency domain (with tiny hairs tuned to each frequency), not in the amplitude domain.
Guys if, like me, you struggled to see the same wave shape in the Oscillioscope, Two things: 1) Make sure the Moscillioscope is set to Normalize 2) n Operator: Check that your Envelope - on OSC B has the same decay as Bill's (600ms) at time of writing this. This is my second time watching this and I figured it out, yay. I know it was probably obvious to alot of you but it wasn't made clear in this video. Cheers for the in depth video!
Gawd blees you. I had instant frustration with this workflow - until i saw your note here. Click on hte 'Normalise' button eveyone!, then the display looks the same as in Mr. Bill's tutorial.. Thanks again Ben Caesar
Regarding the explanation at 5:30 - Surely the zero points are where the speaker is moving the fastest, and producing the largest amount of compression in the air, and the peaks in the waveform display are where the speaker has slowed to a stop. When you add the overtone, you make the curve steeper through the mid-point, adding more energy to the waveform.
@@othmanmoat you may try it, but I'll never play your tunes on my rig. A true square wave will cook a speaker coil way before it's rated power handling capacity. It's similar to an amplifier clipping. Adding harmonic content adds tone further up the frequency spectrum and makes it easier to hear. A pure sine is quiet, but very subby
@@nexusobserve yes i also read it that way, but i believe what @Chelfyn was trying to say is the slope of the curve near the zero crossing between the positive and negative peak affect the compression of the air, meaning the more steep it is, the faster the speaker cone has to move between those peaks, creating more compression.
Not only the best sub bass tutorial I have found, but possibly the best tutorial for beginners trying to wrap their heads around how the amplitude, pitch and phase of a waveform work over time and why it is important to understand when creating original sounds of any kind. Love this!
a note to others: If you want to use this technique with other synths (that don't pitch with harmonic intervals) you can instead use the root, the octave, and the octave +7st, in any synth that supports 3 osc. I've been doing this is Serum for awhile to get "clean distortion harmonics", but adding the knowledge about loudness over time and phase adjustment is super interesting and I'm definitely gunna rejigger my sub patch.
If you go into the Wavetable editor in Serum you can actually draw in the harmonic series and also adjust the phases of every sine wave. You just have to fill in the little boxes called „Bins“ at the top of the wavetable editor and adjust their phases with the bins underneath them. The section is also sometimes called „FFT“ editor“.
Hey Bill. As per perceived loudness and waveforms I think you are missing something here. Its not just an area under the curve deal, its the change in pressure over time. Been a fan for a while and recently started playing the law of diminishing returns watching people's tutorial videos as I'm making stuff for this school Pyramind (you did something with them before a show at the Midway SF maybe a year or so ago...) Came across this I actually just made a similar video about sub bass don't think they have released it yet... So, long and short of it. Adding harmonics adds those frequencies. If you do it additive like that, you make it louder because you added that frequency (as opposed to FM where you pull energy from the root). Assuming Phase synchronous you could add that in another track. Is a sine wave at 330 hz at -6dB added to a 110hz at -3dB louder ? Yes. Does it lower our bass or root / fundamental volume ? No. Spectrograph it. In the way you are thinking about it now, a straight DC signal at..1, lets call positive swing 1 and negative -1, would be the loudest sound. Well that pressure wave would go out and that's that. A perceived click on and in the transducer world the diaphragm is distended with no more throw distance and can't pump out more unless its passive and you wreck it with your amp. Not that we can of course as the Digital to Analogue Converter in the audio interface will high pass it before it gets there. Lets think about that waveform when you show the 3rd harmonic. You are seeing the area under the curve dip down at the peak and trough of the 110hz at 90 and 270 phase degrees. At 180 the 330 is at zero crossing also so its flat. But if you have the 3rd harmonic at half that amplitude in your oscilloscope you get whats looks like a rounded square. Should be louder in your current way of thinking ? Its not. Check this with spectrum. The 110hz is just as loud, and you are adding the 3rd harmonic and as you increase the gain there, look at your track gain. OK now Imagine just the upswing is now our new Biased waveform position. Imagine its a solid block of DC at +1 we said. Ok lets subtract from that. Lets sine at 330 hz with a DC offset there.. so swinging from 5. to 1 and down to 0. Its louder than DC, of course. If you like you can imagine the lowest frequency in your track as a dynamic DC offset. We can subtract or add to that for loudness. You can also think about a square wave then. At 50% duty cycle it satisfies what you would imagine is on for 100% of its upswing and downswing. It can't get louder that that ! But of course it can,,,, and we can shift the duty cycle too. We could have a 1% negative duty cycle square. 99% UPTIME UPSWING ! But its not the area under the curve that makes it loud, its the change in pressure.
Thank you for correcting this. It’s boldly incorrect statements (e.g., that reading the area under the positive curve means anything) that scream someone has no idea what they’re talking about. Credibility vanishes, so why should anyone listen? Obviously one can do something musically and have no idea what the science is, so my science-based alarm isn’t entirely applicable, but it still means I have to wade through the muck to see if there’s something valuable underneath.
There is so much mind blowing content from talented producers. I feel so lucky to have access to this knowledge. This is yet another hard working channel doing good work for artists everywhere. Thank you.
Think about angular velocity. When the sine wave is at the top/bottom of its travel, the velocity of the speaker cone is zero (at its maximum displacement) and moving the air molecules the least. When the sine wave shows zero the cone is at its maximum velocity. It becomes more complex when you consider the compression and expansion of the air due to cone movement. Perceived loudness should be considered over a period of time, a window, where we can generate a statistical view (RMS). The upfront attack and saturation work to trigger our auditory cortex and pathways as to the importance of this sound.
There is a big difference between (low frequency) spl and loudness. A pure sine wave at high power is easy to talk over, it'll shake you to bits, but not sound/feel deafening (although it causes damage). Adding harmonic content adds to the spl making it perceivablly louder.
okay, i think i follow. it sounds like the transient is a cue for the brain to pay attention, but the sense of volume comes from sampling a longer window of sound. how long is the window?
@@mooselessness Hi. I've seen LUFS using a moving window of around 300ms (1/3 sec) and short-term loudness with a 3 second window. The brain works a bit faster than that. If you think about delays, a repeated note less than 30-40ms from the original is perceived as the same note while after 50ms we hear individual notes starting. (Well if they have a transient). I expect, but don't know for sure, that full volume perception is from there for the tail of the sound. Perhaps you may like to do some research on psychodynamics?
Really neat! Also, wavetable synths like Serum or Vital (there's many of them) lets you draw a waveform as well. Additionally you can add harmonics there too (the green bars in Serum's waveform edit window).
Comb filters can be used to achieve subs that are, actually, the sum of many wavelenghts, but using the very same fundamental. Quite interesting approach on subs.
Can you explain a little more? Do you mean setting the comb filter peaks to the harmonics of the fundamental? What kind of waveform are you running through the comb filter?
What I'm really liking about your tutorials is the fact you are assuming some prior knowledge. So many tutorials, including some big names, fall into this trap where they feel the need to appease all audience levels and backtrack over the fundamentals of audio processing and composition. I can see why, but it drives me insane having to scrub though a 40 minute video for 5 minutes of gold. Great work.
I think the loudest would be a saw wave since the noise we hear comes from the movement of the speaker rather than the position itself, therefore our perceived loudness actually depends on the rate of change / derivative of the waveform over a certain length of time. Taking the derivative of a saw wave gives a square wave, which always has the max. amplitude, making that the loudest waveform
@@fluent_styles6720 I think the point he's making would actually be about amplitude multiplied by time, rather than amplitude divided by time (even though the language he uses is "loudness over time"). The long white noise clip seems louder because multiplying its RMS amplitude by a long duration gives a bigger number than amplitude*tiny duration. If it was about amplitude/duration, then the perceived volume of a shorter and shorter click should approach infinity. There's sometimes a similar semantics issue with a quantity like impulse (force*time) for example, which is usually verbalized as "force over time" as shorthand for "a force that is being applied over a period of time". I do think there is additional component of loudness related to the derivative of amplitude though like you're saying. Over a cycle for a given fundamental, the amount of time that the speaker spends moving quickly probably also contributes to a louder sound (ex. pure sine -> saw -> something with added noise, where the derivative for two adjacent samples can be very high very often). Another way to look at this is in the frequency domain, where it's more intuitive that adding more and more harmonics usually makes the sound louder (more peaks showing up on an EQ). Though, keeping the maximum amplitude constant means probably lowering some harmonics while you add others, so then it also starts to matter which frequencies we're most sensitive to (getting into Fletcher Munson/equal loudness curve stuff).
Holy cow, I just started filling in some harmonics in my Serum wavetable editor to get the wave fuller for longer and my subs already sound audible on the E. You're awesome.
Yeah you can just draw in the harmonic following the fundamental on a wavetable in Serum or Vital too and that will create the same effect that Bill is going after here with the waveform ideal. That + a little distortion is great for these tech
Even better you can use the Oscillator tab to draw in the harmonics too. Sytrus and Serum go one better being able to adjust the phase of each harmonic too, but each instrument has its advantages !
Your ears have a sort of built-in compressor. Not literally but the way your brain perceives audio data makes it work in that way. If anyone has ever had an ear-piece in one ear, listening to music or a podcast (like I did once), and the other is left open to a loud environment (say an industrial workshop), to understand what's happening in the ear-piece I naturally had to crank it up, because I was perceiving it to be quieter than my surroundings. Kept at that volume over a few hours, removing the earpiece revealed I was listening much louder than I thought I was and as a result, it's ringing, whereas the other ear wasn't. Loved this vid. Thank you.
Props to you Mr. Bill, can't express how helpful this tutorial is and I reference it constantly to refresh my brain when I am workin on my subz n wubz. thanks for this!
Whoa. Hadn't thought to be this exacting with sub design, but now it slapped me in the face with a whole new realm of possibility and I'm super excited. Great tutorial!! I'm very excited to mess with this one.
Yeah man, thanks for the detailed explanation of what I've been gradually learning through experimentation. I've been using a befaco kickall module with the decay wound right up. The shape knob lets you roll between sine and square, and it has control over time and depth of the initial pitch bend. I saw divkid putting kicks through overdrives, so I put mine through a cheap joyo pocket metal pedal, and nastied it up. Some of the tones I've stumbled through sound very similar to what you're making here.
The perceived loudness and time topic is very interesting. I started noticing that my kicks aren't good enough just because they don't carry the sub info for long enough. Once I started adding boominess with sub tails, my mixing became so much easier and streamlined.
I think that the lenght of a kick tail depends mostly by the interaction with the bass, if there are overlapping notes and or shared frequencies that could get masked or boosted too much.
5:55 Fascinating stuff, man! Basicaly the human brain fills in with the fundamental harmonic(the real sub) when we hear an upper harmonic from added to the sub. This is basically assumption. Thank you for the this video ❤
The mathematical idea behind this is the idea of RMS ("Root-mean-squared") amplitude of the waveform. The RMS is obtained if you take the square of the function describing the wave to make everything positive, take the integral of that and divide by it's length in time (i.e. find the average), then take the square root of the result. You can think of the RMS as a number that describes how far away the wave function is from zero on average over the timespan of a single oscillation.
But it's not just about the amplitude of the wave, it's also the slope. If you have only one horizontal line at max then you would have the highest RMS but a loudness of zero.
For all those who don't use ableton or don't like the operator.. You can also do that in serum and add the next harmonic in the wavetable editor.. you can also do that in the second oscillator and play with the phase there.. but turn the phase randomization off.. then its pretty much the same thing.. Edit: And i think instead of recreate a wavecycle like this, drop it into serum..
This exact same trick can be done in serum using the oscillator editor window! The top bins add harmonics and the bottom bins shift the phase of each harmonic independently! Such a game changer for your low end!
One question, It seems to me like loudness is created not by the speaker cone being out or in, but by the movement between those states which pushes air. So if that's the case it would seem that to achieve the louder for longer goal you'd need greater change in amplitude over time, not higher average amplitude. Am I missing something? Appreciate you Bill!
The ultimate distance the cone travels in and out is producing spl, which is different from perceived loudness. Adding harmonic content produces a more complicated cone movement which sounds louder. A pure sine produces lots of pressure but isn't 'loud'.
when you're measuring "loudness" you take the absolute value of the signal in some way at some point no matter what. so basically what will sound the loudest and measure the loudest is going to be whatever stays at the edges (close to 1 and -1, because they will both = 1 after the abs value). and lo and behold, a square wave is lo
5:55 Fascinating stuff, man! Basicaly the human brain fills in with the fundamental harmonic(the real sub) when we hear an upper harmonic from added to the sub. This is basically assumption. Thank you for the this video ❤
For Logic Pro users; I was able to get that waveform like Bill at the end using Alchemy as the soft synth set to a clean sine sub - I picked Ultra Sub Bass preset with Short Drive setting; which alone will appear like Bill's first example in the scope. After that I added the stock Overdrive plugin and then the Amp Designer Blues Blaster amp. Same amp settings as Bill has in his Amp stock plugin (5 across the board for tone). You'll then get a very similar waveform in the scope as Bill has. Now play around with the volume levels of the Amp Designer stock plugin to affect the waveform. You can also play around with the Coarse/Fine tuning (in Master) in Alchemy to adjust the waveform too as you see Bill do in Operator. Follow Bill's instructions otherwise to get the idea and concepts. But this is how it can be done in Logic Pro with just stock Plugins too. Vital is a free synth that also offers great simple sine waves to use and can be substituted for Alchemy.
Learning some signal theory and maybe reading about Fourier transformation would help here. Yes, the closer you get to a square wave (which this technique is aiming at, fundamentally), the larger the area under the curve becomes, but then you're adding a lot of non-sub frequencies and it stops being a bass.
Yeah this doesn't have anything to do with "loudness over time" and instead has to do with adding more harmonic overtones - which can also make a sound feel louder.
2:57 The two faders are set differently Percieved loudness is not about peaks, it's measured generally in rms or lufs values. But live's faders display peak values
Are you referring to the fact that meter A is +6db on the fader and meter B is set to -2db? That plays no role at all in what he is trying to show here. If anything that adding more volume to the sound that is appearing quieter when its peaking louder proves his point even more. Yup perceived loudness is not about peaks hence why the noise sounded louder that was -8db quieter. You're right, LUFS is a great measurement of perceived loudness and if you measured the LUFS of the two sounds used in this video the noise would have destroyed that little blip that peaked 8db higher. So the real question being answered in this video is how can we get the greatest amount of perceived loudness without raising our db level. When he adds that harmonic in the 3rd bin and the waveform becomes more square the meter volume does not go up at all yet it clearly sounds louder. You can test this for yourself as well, I think you may have misinterpreted this video.
I like these high level descriptions from you Bill, you're good at breaking down the philosophy into simple terms. Please make more stuff like this, I'd love to see a series from you on how you approach making a song, or even an entire album/themed EP just from a high level perspective. I think that's a market very few people have cornered too fwiw. (House of Kush is the only channel I'm aware of which does that kinda thing consistently, and Gregory has a very different background.)
Downloading the Melda vst was actually super easy, I'm having loads of fun playing with the tension, skew, and shape sliders in FL's sytrus to achieve similar results. This video actually deserves to be all capitalization , thanks MR.BILL
Since Mr. Bill is a technical guy I’m assuming he would like criticism. So the sustain if a sound matters of course, and is also evidenced by hearing damage. Sustained sounds have a higher likelihood of damaging your ears. Looking at a sound through an oscilloscope, the position of a speaker cone outside of a zero-point crossing doesn’t dictate volume. A cone can have a direct current offset and will be silent. It’s the velocity of the cone that matters. And sun that regard, it’s the Y axis and NOT the X axis that matters as much in terms of air displacement. It’s the cone traveling that creates higher decibels. It’s not the cone getting to an end of a cycle and sitting. The cone needs to continuously travel (not necessarily cycle) in order to create very loud noises. The real trick to loud subs is symmetrical distortion which he sadly doesn’t go into.
I'm experimenting with throwing that cycle into serum/vital to use it as a wavetable. If you bend it asym, you can make the peaks way longer. Not sure if that makes it better but its a thing lol
Wait, isn't it erroneous that "it is completely silent" at the zero crossing points? I mean, that's when the speaker element has its highest velocity (in the sine wave example)? Think of it, the speaker element is pushed to an extreme and actually changes its direction when it's at one of the peaks. I may be wrong but I think you have to look at where the element is coming from. Basically, if you don't play a sound, the speaker element will be in the middle (a zero crossing point) and will indeed be quiet. So it boils down to what loudness really is on a real time basis. Sound is waves of changing pressure. So, is it therefore the slope of the curve in the oscilloscope? If so, the loudest part will be where the slope (the derivative) is steepest. Which, with a sine wave will be at the zero crossing points. In a more distorted sound, the maximum will be somewhere else. Or is it the slope of the slope? I don't know but I think it's wrong to say that the there is silence at the zero crossing points.
This is the kind of stuff I've been anticipating for years. Producing music digitally gives you so much creative freedom and I feel it's rarely being used ... (And as long as the "modern pop" bullshit keeps making money, it's up to better artists to utilize that freedom.) Thanks for the video and your work!
Always fun to rewatch this. It's been helpful over time. I wish I knew how to be a RUclipsr, because I have hella different ways to make really effective subs. I spent 6 months trying to make this one sub sound I had in my head, but failed basically always. Along the way, however, every dang-a-tang bit of research I did........ like, I can make so many dank subs that were not my goal. I achieved my goal, which is basically, a bare bones explanation, a pitch drop of maybe 4 semitones over an 1/8th note LFO envelope with just a down saw shape.....so stupidly simple. I just wanted a fatty funk 1980s/Florida Breakbeat deal! I think I put in well, well, well over 50 hours in on this, maybe more than a hundred. Any excuse not to actually try writing music, because that shit is fucking impossible for me. Of the top of my head, having Manalyzer out while drawing in harmonics can be fun. Just gotta keep altering what you draw constantly as you alter everything. Like, looking at how differently different saturation changes harmonics (Saturn2 tape works heavily on the 2nd harmonic right away, but it's tube works on the 1st.... and patterns stem the more saturation gooses a sine... sort of odd and even harmonic patterns, but not quite neatly that simple..... other saturations = more to look at in Manalyzer, or SPAN, but I think Manalyzer is cooler cuz it lets you hear things if you click on the chart). --sincerly, stuck in bed with a dislocated back...... I'm going to go prop myself up on my desk with pillows and ffff with some sonics anyways. Dying of boredom. Ez
Heard about it in your masterclass 2 years ago! Definitely took it out, this is genius, great you did a short video about it as I gave the technic to many friends ;) Good job buddy
You can do the same kind of thing by using a sine wave and the Ableton Saturator effect. Start with Soft Sine mode and play with the Base, Freq, and Depth controls and try switching soft clip on and off. You can really get some nice results if you do it while fine tuning with your ear and MOSC.
I only watched this to get an idea how to produce better subs, but I got so much more. You made a dry subject (I think), into a really interesting presentation. Thanks for posting
I understand the point with sustain = more power, though the really short noise snippets were much louder to me. However, I have speakers that use ribbons/AMTs, meaning they have great high-frequency and transient response to better represent such a quick blip.
you've inspired me to grow my hair exactly like yours! I have screen shotted your most recent video and have brought it to my barber! its going to take a while to grow, but how did you get to have your hair how it is today? love to hear back from you, thanks mate!
I just use FM8's Parabol wave, I recreated it drawing it harmonically inside Sytrus in FL to round it more visually for self experimental reasons, exported the wave form and use it pretty much all the time, a good way to accentuate the harmonics for me is a light camel crusher... been doing it for a few years or so. And another technique with most FM synths, is to route noise to a sine wave and RM the sine wave with Noise and to not output it directly, If I recall correctly that's a technique Mick Gordon mentioned he uses. 'If' I recalled correctly. Ads just enough consistent harmonics for perceived loudness to keep it sounding consistent, noticed This man himself using the technique like in Boop Ft Esseks!
Sub with 3rd harmonic definitely sounds nicer when driven if the phases start at different angles, but from the clean signal you can only lose headroom in this way; i.e., make the perceived clean signal with the same headroom quieter.
I've experimented a bit with this and found it really difficult to make deeper bass audible without using FM. Even with adding more first, second harmonics it sounded really differently
weird, i'm not getting that same neuro distortion effect at all when adding the 9th in, just an added sine tone * edit - it was the filter shaper drive on B that I was missing!
Sorry if I dont get the full scale of the trick, but isnt the first part not just a complicated way of using a pulse/square wave with rounded corners (a.k.a low pass)? Or a sine with soft clip. Its widely adopted by drum and bass producers (using squares instead of sines).
I'm trying to learn how to make different subs but I did learn how to make an interesting patch that builds off this sort of harmonic fundamental for building a sub, likewise, using a fast lfo to modulate the volume of a white noise oscillator or erosion gives it that jittery feel that I think is similar to copycatt's tracks. Also, cranking the low end and cutting the midst on an OTT makes the sub real beefy and present in the mix. My all time favorite thing to do though is layer over the sub, have some mid-range /high range noise with a more aggressive transient on top of this sort of sub patch and change the attack on the sub to come in at roughly 100 ms (or whatever you like, I'm just a guy)
Sorry to verbal diarrhea here, I just got real excited rewatching this, and I chugged a big cup of coffee and went to take a shit irl and I couldn't stop typing. If you try making a noise this way link it in this comment, I'd be happy to hear it :)
The high-level idea here (in case I didn't explain quite clearly enough) is:
1. Our ears are very perceptive to volume over time when it comes to perceived loudness, and therefore
2. If you make sounds in your productions louder for more time on the single-cycle scale (such as in your subs), they will sound perceptibly louder to the human ear at basically no headroom cost!
This is a great video and explanation. Just to add, in case this helps to clarify for people who think similarly to me:
Waveforms that spend more time away from 0 have more energy, or power (the sum of the area under the curve, what’s often measured as the “root mean square” or RMS).
If you think about a speaker cone, with no power applied to it, it rests at zero. But if you apply power to it (with your finger, or with an electrical current to the speaker driver) it moves away from its zero point. So more powerful waves are pushing or pulling the speaker cone for more time than less powerful waves. And the same thing is true at our ears. Loud sounds spend more time pushing or pulling our eardrums.
If the sub would sound perceivably louder while it’s at 100 on the scope, then it seems like it would have been loudest before any phase was added, is adding the phase just helpful if you want to increase the volume of the upper harmonic? To help reshape it after increasing the volume on the upper harmonic? Thanks!!
@@enneff This is technically true, but "power" in this sense doesn't necessarily translate to audible volume. By your reckoning a 100Hz sine wave has much less power than a waveform of the same amplitude that goes from zero to max and stays there for a minute before dropping back to zero. But you'll only be able to hear the sine wave.
The method for making subs is sound but I'm not convinced of the reasoning behind it, I still feel like the increase in perceived loudness is just because you have to add harmonics to change the wave shape, introducing higher frequencies that are naturally perceived as louder than lower frequencies, when played at the same amplitude.
Hi Bill, I'm a huge fan, Denver dojo member, and fellow RUclipsr. I made a similar video last year on sub wave shapes but my hypothesis is very different, though correllated. I'm really curious what you think.
ruclips.net/video/tAcoLUidQUw/видео.html
You talk about loudness as the amount of time spent at full scale away from the zero-crossing. IMy hypothesis is that loudness is not that, but something directly correlated to that: it is how steep the wave is (and thus how much force the speaker cone moves with) as it goes from -1 in to +1 out.
Distort a sine wave and it'll be all the way out/in more of the time, but it also becomes steeper and pushes the air in the speaker cone out at you faster. If loudness were just being away from 0, then a DC offset at full scale would be loud. Instead what we have is higher frequency sounds are louder at the same amplitude (they push/pull faster and more often) and the equal loudness curve is downward sloping.
I also think it is important for subs to have more time to gather air into the vacuum created as the speaker cone is sucked in for longer before it thrusts out the collected air. More air actually gets accumulated and then pushed out with more force. Interestingly, a rounded sine's shape does just this intuitively, but it also has all the odd harmonics in phase so they all push and pull together with the fundamental.
Anyway, please let me know what you think. Also, try the cableguys waveshaper for subs, you'll love it.
@@Missing_Lynx Yeah, and isn't the steepest waveform a square wave?
The authentic sub recipe, as taught to me by my grandfather.
Lmaoooo u funny as hell
Kids of the future will talk about that
Thank you for this amazing recipe. It's Bassicious.
Thank you for this amazing recipe. It's Bassicious.
Catt Clan's authentic Moonshine Sub
* chef's kiss *
The shape of the waveform doesn't really have anything to do with perceived loudness. Make an experiment:
Play a 50 Hz square wave. That's as "loud" as a sound can be. Actually the term is crest factor - it's how much the RMS of the signal is close to the peak level. For a square wave the two are identical. Now apply an allowed filter (or a phasers with no LFO and all wet - as that's the same thing).
They will sound identical, and be just as loud.
Now inspect the waveform of the allpassed version. Wacky, eh? The thing is: the harmonic content is exactly the same between the two, the only thing different is that harmonics are shifted in phase (delayed) by different amounts in the allpassed version.
Our ears register sound in the frequency domain (with tiny hairs tuned to each frequency), not in the amplitude domain.
you know, i'm something of an insane sub myself
Clever
I'm howling 😂
@@moodmusik 🤣
Guys if, like me, you struggled to see the same wave shape in the Oscillioscope,
Two things:
1) Make sure the Moscillioscope is set to Normalize
2) n Operator: Check that your Envelope - on OSC B has the same decay as Bill's (600ms) at time of writing this.
This is my second time watching this and I figured it out, yay. I know it was probably obvious to alot of you but it wasn't made clear in this video.
Cheers for the in depth video!
Gawd blees you. I had instant frustration with this workflow - until i saw your note here. Click on hte 'Normalise' button eveyone!, then the display looks the same as in Mr. Bill's tutorial.. Thanks again Ben Caesar
@@AndyRrayMusic Bro this had me for at least an hour. Glad it helped 🙌🏾and forward we go
thank you for this.. was following along and got stuck here. i thought i checked it pretty well but missed #2!! thank you!!
@@PositiveCation happy I'm not the only that was hitting a wall with this tbh 🤣🙌🏾🙌🏾
A student showed me this today and informed me well and good :D thanks!
An actually interesting video as opposed to the usual “WHATTTTS UP BOIS TODAY WE ARE GOING TO BE MAKING THE FATTEST SUB EVER IN SERUM”
Hi Bill
looks like you lost some weight since i seen you last. looking healthier than ever.
Cheers
Thanks Dad. I'm actually impressed you have a RUclips account 😅
@@MrBillsTunes I didn't know I had a you tube account? (Fucking sneaky Bastards) Cheers😊
Wholesome :)
Its cool to see a supportive dad here. Mr Bill you should bring Bill Day on one of your videos one time.
based dad
Regarding the explanation at 5:30 - Surely the zero points are where the speaker is moving the fastest, and producing the largest amount of compression in the air, and the peaks in the waveform display are where the speaker has slowed to a stop. When you add the overtone, you make the curve steeper through the mid-point, adding more energy to the waveform.
yeah exactly, it's like saying DC offset is louder
Why not just a square waveform then?
@@othmanmoat you may try it, but I'll never play your tunes on my rig. A true square wave will cook a speaker coil way before it's rated power handling capacity. It's similar to an amplifier clipping.
Adding harmonic content adds tone further up the frequency spectrum and makes it easier to hear. A pure sine is quiet, but very subby
Zero points are where there is no compression or rarefaction of air molecules.... it's zero. Zero isn't loud
@@nexusobserve yes i also read it that way, but i believe what @Chelfyn was trying to say is the slope of the curve near the zero crossing between the positive and negative peak affect the compression of the air, meaning the more steep it is, the faster the speaker cone has to move between those peaks, creating more compression.
Not only the best sub bass tutorial I have found, but possibly the best tutorial for beginners trying to wrap their heads around how the amplitude, pitch and phase of a waveform work over time and why it is important to understand when creating original sounds of any kind. Love this!
Shout out for Melda plugins. Honestly, this free suite is so valuable to me.
This is by far one of the most helpful sound design videos I’ve ever seen.
you should become a hardcore abletoneer on his website. best value for your money when it comes to outstanding tutorials!
a note to others: If you want to use this technique with other synths (that don't pitch with harmonic intervals)
you can instead use the root, the octave, and the octave +7st, in any synth that supports 3 osc.
I've been doing this is Serum for awhile to get "clean distortion harmonics", but adding the knowledge about loudness over time and phase adjustment is super interesting and I'm definitely gunna rejigger my sub patch.
Semitones are gonna be a bit off from the actual harmic though. Might wanna tune it to an exact frequency to get them synced better.
@@leo.nordmann serum also lets you tune in cents, so you could get the frequency to be just the right ratio if you want.
If you go into the Wavetable editor in Serum you can actually draw in the harmonic series and also adjust the phases of every sine wave. You just have to fill in the little boxes called „Bins“ at the top of the wavetable editor and adjust their phases with the bins underneath them.
The section is also sometimes called „FFT“ editor“.
Serum only has 2 osc though not 3 ? :/
@@blindcamel6236 not if you use the sub osc
_“So in essence, DistroKid paid me to say this.”_
Realest promo I’ve ever heard lol.
Hey Bill. As per perceived loudness and waveforms I think you are missing something here. Its not just an area under the curve deal, its the change in pressure over time. Been a fan for a while and recently started playing the law of diminishing returns watching people's tutorial videos as I'm making stuff for this school Pyramind (you did something with them before a show at the Midway SF maybe a year or so ago...) Came across this I actually just made a similar video about sub bass don't think they have released it yet... So, long and short of it. Adding harmonics adds those frequencies. If you do it additive like that, you make it louder because you added that frequency (as opposed to FM where you pull energy from the root). Assuming Phase synchronous you could add that in another track. Is a sine wave at 330 hz at -6dB added to a 110hz at -3dB louder ? Yes. Does it lower our bass or root / fundamental volume ? No. Spectrograph it. In the way you are thinking about it now, a straight DC signal at..1, lets call positive swing 1 and negative -1, would be the loudest sound. Well that pressure wave would go out and that's that. A perceived click on and in the transducer world the diaphragm is distended with no more throw distance and can't pump out more unless its passive and you wreck it with your amp. Not that we can of course as the Digital to Analogue Converter in the audio interface will high pass it before it gets there. Lets think about that waveform when you show the 3rd harmonic. You are seeing the area under the curve dip down at the peak and trough of the 110hz at 90 and 270 phase degrees. At 180 the 330 is at zero crossing also so its flat. But if you have the 3rd harmonic at half that amplitude in your oscilloscope you get whats looks like a rounded square. Should be louder in your current way of thinking ? Its not. Check this with spectrum. The 110hz is just as loud, and you are adding the 3rd harmonic and as you increase the gain there, look at your track gain. OK now Imagine just the upswing is now our new Biased waveform position. Imagine its a solid block of DC at +1 we said. Ok lets subtract from that. Lets sine at 330 hz with a DC offset there.. so swinging from 5. to 1 and down to 0. Its louder than DC, of course. If you like you can imagine the lowest frequency in your track as a dynamic DC offset. We can subtract or add to that for loudness. You can also think about a square wave then. At 50% duty cycle it satisfies what you would imagine is on for 100% of its upswing and downswing. It can't get louder that that ! But of course it can,,,, and we can shift the duty cycle too. We could have a 1% negative duty cycle square. 99% UPTIME UPSWING ! But its not the area under the curve that makes it loud, its the change in pressure.
Thank you for taking the time to explain this
Nicely explained
Thank you for correcting this.
It’s boldly incorrect statements (e.g., that reading the area under the positive curve means anything) that scream someone has no idea what they’re talking about. Credibility vanishes, so why should anyone listen?
Obviously one can do something musically and have no idea what the science is, so my science-based alarm isn’t entirely applicable, but it still means I have to wade through the muck to see if there’s something valuable underneath.
Never thought of subs like this, I used to chuck in a sine wave and call it a day
There is so much mind blowing content from talented producers. I feel so lucky to have access to this knowledge. This is yet another hard working channel doing good work for artists everywhere. Thank you.
*Talking about erosion* "This is a bit of an overused fx at this point"
I feel personally attacked
Think about angular velocity. When the sine wave is at the top/bottom of its travel, the velocity of the speaker cone is zero (at its maximum displacement) and moving the air molecules the least. When the sine wave shows zero the cone is at its maximum velocity. It becomes more complex when you consider the compression and expansion of the air due to cone movement. Perceived loudness should be considered over a period of time, a window, where we can generate a statistical view (RMS). The upfront attack and saturation work to trigger our auditory cortex and pathways as to the importance of this sound.
More fancy words please.
There is a big difference between (low frequency) spl and loudness. A pure sine wave at high power is easy to talk over, it'll shake you to bits, but not sound/feel deafening (although it causes damage). Adding harmonic content adds to the spl making it perceivablly louder.
Thank you both with your input and logic to how this works and the details that come with it
okay, i think i follow. it sounds like the transient is a cue for the brain to pay attention, but the sense of volume comes from sampling a longer window of sound. how long is the window?
@@mooselessness Hi. I've seen LUFS using a moving window of around 300ms (1/3 sec) and short-term loudness with a 3 second window. The brain works a bit faster than that. If you think about delays, a repeated note less than 30-40ms from the original is perceived as the same note while after 50ms we hear individual notes starting. (Well if they have a transient). I expect, but don't know for sure, that full volume perception is from there for the tail of the sound. Perhaps you may like to do some research on psychodynamics?
Really neat! Also, wavetable synths like Serum or Vital (there's many of them) lets you draw a waveform as well. Additionally you can add harmonics there too (the green bars in Serum's waveform edit window).
Comb filters can be used to achieve subs that are, actually, the sum of many wavelenghts, but using the very same fundamental.
Quite interesting approach on subs.
Can you explain a little more? Do you mean setting the comb filter peaks to the harmonics of the fundamental? What kind of waveform are you running through the comb filter?
What I'm really liking about your tutorials is the fact you are assuming some prior knowledge. So many tutorials, including some big names, fall into this trap where they feel the need to appease all audience levels and backtrack over the fundamentals of audio processing and composition. I can see why, but it drives me insane having to scrub though a 40 minute video for 5 minutes of gold. Great work.
8:34 So in theory, wouldn't using a square wave be the loudest waveform over the longest period of time?
I think the loudest would be a saw wave since the noise we hear comes from the movement of the speaker rather than the position itself, therefore our perceived loudness actually depends on the rate of change / derivative of the waveform over a certain length of time. Taking the derivative of a saw wave gives a square wave, which always has the max. amplitude, making that the loudest waveform
@@fluent_styles6720 I think the point he's making would actually be about amplitude multiplied by time, rather than amplitude divided by time (even though the language he uses is "loudness over time"). The long white noise clip seems louder because multiplying its RMS amplitude by a long duration gives a bigger number than amplitude*tiny duration. If it was about amplitude/duration, then the perceived volume of a shorter and shorter click should approach infinity.
There's sometimes a similar semantics issue with a quantity like impulse (force*time) for example, which is usually verbalized as "force over time" as shorthand for "a force that is being applied over a period of time".
I do think there is additional component of loudness related to the derivative of amplitude though like you're saying. Over a cycle for a given fundamental, the amount of time that the speaker spends moving quickly probably also contributes to a louder sound (ex. pure sine -> saw -> something with added noise, where the derivative for two adjacent samples can be very high very often). Another way to look at this is in the frequency domain, where it's more intuitive that adding more and more harmonics usually makes the sound louder (more peaks showing up on an EQ). Though, keeping the maximum amplitude constant means probably lowering some harmonics while you add others, so then it also starts to matter which frequencies we're most sensitive to (getting into Fletcher Munson/equal loudness curve stuff).
I think you're right. You can't make a wave with a cycle fatter and fuller than a square wave ...
Holy cow, I just started filling in some harmonics in my Serum wavetable editor to get the wave fuller for longer and my subs already sound audible on the E. You're awesome.
Yeah you can just draw in the harmonic following the fundamental on a wavetable in Serum or Vital too and that will create the same effect that Bill is going after here with the waveform ideal. That + a little distortion is great for these tech
Even better you can use the Oscillator tab to draw in the harmonics too. Sytrus and Serum go one better being able to adjust the phase of each harmonic too, but each instrument has its advantages !
Sytrus is bae
Bill : Subs can be like pretty..... And interesting...
Me : yes daddy
Ah hell nah
@@k_nito7954 spunch bop
Only a matter of time till Bill gets his mate Tipper on a video teaching us how to make a Doof Wagon with a muscle car and a couple of Funktion Ones.
One can hope 💗
Your ears have a sort of built-in compressor. Not literally but the way your brain perceives audio data makes it work in that way.
If anyone has ever had an ear-piece in one ear, listening to music or a podcast (like I did once), and the other is left open to a loud environment (say an industrial workshop), to understand what's happening in the ear-piece I naturally had to crank it up, because I was perceiving it to be quieter than my surroundings. Kept at that volume over a few hours, removing the earpiece revealed I was listening much louder than I thought I was and as a result, it's ringing, whereas the other ear wasn't.
Loved this vid. Thank you.
Props to you Mr. Bill, can't express how helpful this tutorial is and I reference it constantly to refresh my brain when I am workin on my subz n wubz. thanks for this!
This is exactly what I needed to spice up a track I'm making and it was driving me crazy. Thanks bruv
0:06 Is that the *legendary brown note?*
Whoa. Hadn't thought to be this exacting with sub design, but now it slapped me in the face with a whole new realm of possibility and I'm super excited. Great tutorial!! I'm very excited to mess with this one.
Yeah man, thanks for the detailed explanation of what I've been gradually learning through experimentation. I've been using a befaco kickall module with the decay wound right up. The shape knob lets you roll between sine and square, and it has control over time and depth of the initial pitch bend. I saw divkid putting kicks through overdrives, so I put mine through a cheap joyo pocket metal pedal, and nastied it up. Some of the tones I've stumbled through sound very similar to what you're making here.
The perceived loudness and time topic is very interesting. I started noticing that my kicks aren't good enough just because they don't carry the sub info for long enough. Once I started adding boominess with sub tails, my mixing became so much easier and streamlined.
I think that the lenght of a kick tail depends mostly by the interaction with the bass, if there are overlapping notes and or shared frequencies that could get masked or boosted too much.
5:55 Fascinating stuff, man! Basicaly the human brain fills in with the fundamental harmonic(the real sub) when we hear an upper harmonic from added to the sub. This is basically assumption. Thank you for the this video ❤
omfg, THIS IS how that growling phat ass sub is done, thank you so much! If applied note by note basis this sounds beyond satisfying
The mathematical idea behind this is the idea of RMS ("Root-mean-squared") amplitude of the waveform. The RMS is obtained if you take the square of the function describing the wave to make everything positive, take the integral of that and divide by it's length in time (i.e. find the average), then take the square root of the result. You can think of the RMS as a number that describes how far away the wave function is from zero on average over the timespan of a single oscillation.
But it's not just about the amplitude of the wave, it's also the slope. If you have only one horizontal line at max then you would have the highest RMS but a loudness of zero.
For all those who don't use ableton or don't like the operator.. You can also do that in serum and add the next harmonic in the wavetable editor.. you can also do that in the second oscillator and play with the phase there.. but turn the phase randomization off.. then its pretty much the same thing..
Edit: And i think instead of recreate a wavecycle like this, drop it into serum..
6:09 Huh didn't know you could play Tetris in Ableton...why did i get fl!?
This exact same trick can be done in serum using the oscillator editor window! The top bins add harmonics and the bottom bins shift the phase of each harmonic independently! Such a game changer for your low end!
This, mayn!!! Thanx so much …
One question, It seems to me like loudness is created not by the speaker cone being out or in, but by the movement between those states which pushes air. So if that's the case it would seem that to achieve the louder for longer goal you'd need greater change in amplitude over time, not higher average amplitude. Am I missing something? Appreciate you Bill!
This is true. I was just about to make a comment saying this
The ultimate distance the cone travels in and out is producing spl, which is different from perceived loudness. Adding harmonic content produces a more complicated cone movement which sounds louder. A pure sine produces lots of pressure but isn't 'loud'.
You are abosolutely right. The part about the cone being silent at the 0 crossing points is not true
when you're measuring "loudness" you take the absolute value of the signal in some way at some point no matter what. so basically what will sound the loudest and measure the loudest is going to be whatever stays at the edges (close to 1 and -1, because they will both = 1 after the abs value). and lo and behold, a square wave is lo
5:55 Fascinating stuff, man! Basicaly the human brain fills in with the fundamental harmonic(the real sub) when we hear an upper harmonic from added to the sub. This is basically assumption. Thank you for the this video ❤
For Logic Pro users; I was able to get that waveform like Bill at the end using Alchemy as the soft synth set to a clean sine sub - I picked Ultra Sub Bass preset with Short Drive setting; which alone will appear like Bill's first example in the scope.
After that I added the stock Overdrive plugin and then the Amp Designer Blues Blaster amp. Same amp settings as Bill has in his Amp stock plugin (5 across the board for tone). You'll then get a very similar waveform in the scope as Bill has. Now play around with the volume levels of the Amp Designer stock plugin to affect the waveform. You can also play around with the Coarse/Fine tuning (in Master) in Alchemy to adjust the waveform too as you see Bill do in Operator.
Follow Bill's instructions otherwise to get the idea and concepts. But this is how it can be done in Logic Pro with just stock Plugins too. Vital is a free synth that also offers great simple sine waves to use and can be substituted for Alchemy.
Nice one. Cheers
Learning some signal theory and maybe reading about Fourier transformation would help here. Yes, the closer you get to a square wave (which this technique is aiming at, fundamentally), the larger the area under the curve becomes, but then you're adding a lot of non-sub frequencies and it stops being a bass.
Yeah this doesn't have anything to do with "loudness over time" and instead has to do with adding more harmonic overtones - which can also make a sound feel louder.
2:57
The two faders are set differently
Percieved loudness is not about peaks, it's measured generally in rms or lufs values. But live's faders display peak values
Are you referring to the fact that meter A is +6db on the fader and meter B is set to -2db? That plays no role at all in what he is trying to show here. If anything that adding more volume to the sound that is appearing quieter when its peaking louder proves his point even more. Yup perceived loudness is not about peaks hence why the noise sounded louder that was -8db quieter. You're right, LUFS is a great measurement of perceived loudness and if you measured the LUFS of the two sounds used in this video the noise would have destroyed that little blip that peaked 8db higher. So the real question being answered in this video is how can we get the greatest amount of perceived loudness without raising our db level. When he adds that harmonic in the 3rd bin and the waveform becomes more square the meter volume does not go up at all yet it clearly sounds louder. You can test this for yourself as well, I think you may have misinterpreted this video.
@@kylehegger5549 thats a good point
@@samegan6542 ayyy happy you ended up seeing this although that comment was from a year ago :) best wishes dude
2:52 That scared the absolute shit out of me
Knew this was gonna get someone hahaha
I like these high level descriptions from you Bill, you're good at breaking down the philosophy into simple terms. Please make more stuff like this, I'd love to see a series from you on how you approach making a song, or even an entire album/themed EP just from a high level perspective. I think that's a market very few people have cornered too fwiw. (House of Kush is the only channel I'm aware of which does that kinda thing consistently, and Gregory has a very different background.)
This is a good continuation of your online seminar... Loudness = amplitude over time. Nicely displayed.
You always leave a Mr. Bill Tutorial smuggly knowing this info is super handy
Excellent video Bill! Smashed it
Insane! Moscilloscope being free is insane as well!
Love the intricate sound design. Awesome lesson!
Downloading the Melda vst was actually super easy, I'm having loads of fun playing with the tension, skew, and shape sliders in FL's sytrus to achieve similar results. This video actually deserves to be all capitalization , thanks MR.BILL
“Restoration of the fundamental” I learned something new, and I have a masters in audio. Thank you!!
❤️ Thanks you! I want to try this in Miniraze now. Using 2 diff waves to increase harmonics is something it does really well.
Since Mr. Bill is a technical guy I’m assuming he would like criticism. So the sustain if a sound matters of course, and is also evidenced by hearing damage. Sustained sounds have a higher likelihood of damaging your ears.
Looking at a sound through an oscilloscope, the position of a speaker cone outside of a zero-point crossing doesn’t dictate volume. A cone can have a direct current offset and will be silent. It’s the velocity of the cone that matters. And sun that regard, it’s the Y axis and NOT the X axis that matters as much in terms of air displacement. It’s the cone traveling that creates higher decibels. It’s not the cone getting to an end of a cycle and sitting. The cone needs to continuously travel (not necessarily cycle) in order to create very loud noises.
The real trick to loud subs is symmetrical distortion which he sadly doesn’t go into.
Thanks Bill, great tutorial!
This is a unique way of looking at it, thank you
I'm experimenting with throwing that cycle into serum/vital to use it as a wavetable. If you bend it asym, you can make the peaks way longer. Not sure if that makes it better but its a thing lol
Wait, isn't it erroneous that "it is completely silent" at the zero crossing points? I mean, that's when the speaker element has its highest velocity (in the sine wave example)? Think of it, the speaker element is pushed to an extreme and actually changes its direction when it's at one of the peaks. I may be wrong but I think you have to look at where the element is coming from. Basically, if you don't play a sound, the speaker element will be in the middle (a zero crossing point) and will indeed be quiet. So it boils down to what loudness really is on a real time basis. Sound is waves of changing pressure. So, is it therefore the slope of the curve in the oscilloscope? If so, the loudest part will be where the slope (the derivative) is steepest. Which, with a sine wave will be at the zero crossing points. In a more distorted sound, the maximum will be somewhere else. Or is it the slope of the slope? I don't know but I think it's wrong to say that the there is silence at the zero crossing points.
Dr. bill u are looking really good! U been eating well I hope
Always so happy to see when you post, I've learned so much from you, much appreciated!!
Thank you so much Mr bill and copy cat I really needed that.
Damn, pretty awesome! Thanks, I'll definitely be giving this a shot now and see what I can come up with 😋👀
This is the kind of stuff I've been anticipating for years. Producing music digitally gives you so much creative freedom and I feel it's rarely being used ...
(And as long as the "modern pop" bullshit keeps making money, it's up to better artists to utilize that freedom.)
Thanks for the video and your work!
Always fun to rewatch this. It's been helpful over time. I wish I knew how to be a RUclipsr, because I have hella different ways to make really effective subs. I spent 6 months trying to make this one sub sound I had in my head, but failed basically always. Along the way, however, every dang-a-tang bit of research I did........ like, I can make so many dank subs that were not my goal. I achieved my goal, which is basically, a bare bones explanation, a pitch drop of maybe 4 semitones over an 1/8th note LFO envelope with just a down saw shape.....so stupidly simple. I just wanted a fatty funk 1980s/Florida Breakbeat deal! I think I put in well, well, well over 50 hours in on this, maybe more than a hundred. Any excuse not to actually try writing music, because that shit is fucking impossible for me.
Of the top of my head, having Manalyzer out while drawing in harmonics can be fun. Just gotta keep altering what you draw constantly as you alter everything. Like, looking at how differently different saturation changes harmonics (Saturn2 tape works heavily on the 2nd harmonic right away, but it's tube works on the 1st.... and patterns stem the more saturation gooses a sine... sort of odd and even harmonic patterns, but not quite neatly that simple..... other saturations = more to look at in Manalyzer, or SPAN, but I think Manalyzer is cooler cuz it lets you hear things if you click on the chart).
--sincerly, stuck in bed with a dislocated back...... I'm going to go prop myself up on my desk with pillows and ffff with some sonics anyways. Dying of boredom. Ez
Heard about it in your masterclass 2 years ago! Definitely took it out, this is genius, great you did a short video about it as I gave the technic to many friends ;)
Good job buddy
You can do the same kind of thing by using a sine wave and the Ableton Saturator effect. Start with Soft Sine mode and play with the Base, Freq, and Depth controls and try switching soft clip on and off. You can really get some nice results if you do it while fine tuning with your ear and MOSC.
How am i just now finding out that mr bill has a youtube channel
Wow, sick stuff man! Thanks a lot, subs are always a problematic subject, especially when it comes to final limiting. But that's another story
I only watched this to get an idea how to produce better subs, but I got so much more. You made a dry subject (I think), into a really interesting presentation. Thanks for posting
mr god
Nice demonstration, thanks! I think my neighbours are really gonna love this.
I understand the point with sustain = more power, though the really short noise snippets were much louder to me. However, I have speakers that use ribbons/AMTs, meaning they have great high-frequency and transient response to better represent such a quick blip.
you've inspired me to grow my hair exactly like yours! I have screen shotted your most recent video and have brought it to my barber! its going to take a while to grow, but how did you get to have your hair how it is today? love to hear back from you, thanks mate!
Sheeeeeeet. I was thinking u were gonna tell me how to make my subs hit harder to annoy more people!
You can make the same analogy for welding sparks.
They have temperatures like 1300°C but don't hurt as much as a big gulp of scalding hot milk (82°C).
One Love!
Always forward, never ever backward!!
☀☀☀
💚💛❤
🙏🏿🙏🙏🏼
I just use FM8's Parabol wave, I recreated it drawing it harmonically inside Sytrus in FL to round it more visually for self experimental reasons, exported the wave form and use it pretty much all the time, a good way to accentuate the harmonics for me is a light camel crusher... been doing it for a few years or so.
And another technique with most FM synths, is to route noise to a sine wave and RM the sine wave with Noise and to not output it directly, If I recall correctly that's a technique Mick Gordon mentioned he uses. 'If' I recalled correctly. Ads just enough consistent harmonics for perceived loudness to keep it sounding consistent, noticed This man himself using the technique like in Boop Ft Esseks!
Sub with 3rd harmonic definitely sounds nicer when driven if the phases start at different angles, but from the clean signal you can only lose headroom in this way; i.e., make the perceived clean signal with the same headroom quieter.
Super cool technique though and I wouldn't have thought of doing this, be right back, gonna make rack.
I've experimented a bit with this and found it really difficult to make deeper bass audible without using FM. Even with adding more first, second harmonics it sounded really differently
Always great tips, always great videos, Thanks Bill.
seriously awesome video thanks so much! please make more like this! love learning about this kinda stuff
Super interesting to apply harmonic series knowledge to subs
weird, i'm not getting that same neuro distortion effect at all when adding the 9th in, just an added sine tone
* edit - it was the filter shaper drive on B that I was missing!
Just came here to say mad props on the weight loss! also thanks for the epic tutorials!
This is next level! Thank you for sharing.
Mr Bill is a really good teacher and communicator.
This is particularly useful to make subs a little bit more noticeable in small speakers, phones, earbuds, etc.
What COPYCATT song does he play a clip of at 1:57??? It's driving me crazy because I LOVE it and I can't for the life of me find it.
Sounds like Indent by tinyghost and COPYCATT
Teddy Killers just did a video on this with Serum's wavetable editor, pretty neat stuff.
Can you link it
@@mynameskobe6838 ruclips.net/video/ZrZpnKh6k1o/видео.html
Nice tutorial, been enjoying this technique since you showed it on one of your live lectures
Sorry if I dont get the full scale of the trick, but isnt the first part not just a complicated way of using a pulse/square wave with rounded corners (a.k.a low pass)? Or a sine with soft clip. Its widely adopted by drum and bass producers (using squares instead of sines).
This is an amazing tutorial. It honestly gave me a more furnished way of getting loud subs without abusing a saturator/limiter/hardclipper.
Hey Mr. Bill, I love your skills. Keep up the dope tutorials!
Great technique, love your breakdown and explanation.
"So it's in the realm of kinda what it is."
No dude, it was literally almost the same sound minus dist and the modulation.
Dope content like always.
Pff that septum makes it a serious challenge to do a bump
I'm trying to learn how to make different subs but I did learn how to make an interesting patch that builds off this sort of harmonic fundamental for building a sub, likewise, using a fast lfo to modulate the volume of a white noise oscillator or erosion gives it that jittery feel that I think is similar to copycatt's tracks. Also, cranking the low end and cutting the midst on an OTT makes the sub real beefy and present in the mix. My all time favorite thing to do though is layer over the sub, have some mid-range /high range noise with a more aggressive transient on top of this sort of sub patch and change the attack on the sub to come in at roughly 100 ms (or whatever you like, I'm just a guy)
Sorry to verbal diarrhea here, I just got real excited rewatching this, and I chugged a big cup of coffee and went to take a shit irl and I couldn't stop typing. If you try making a noise this way link it in this comment, I'd be happy to hear it :)
love learning from you bro, insane
hats off - wonderfully explained. Thanks Mr Bill!