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There's a saying that "You can never be too thin or too rich." That may work for Nicole Ritchie, but it's only half-right for keyboard synth bass: Rich is good, but thin isn't. Looking for a truly corpulent bass sound that's designed to dominate your mix? These techniques will take you there.
LAYERS GOOD, LAYERS BAD
A common approach to Grafting a bigger sound is to layer slightly detuned oscillators. However, that can actually create a thinner sound because slight detunings cause volume peaks but also, volume valleys. This not only diffuses the sound, but often makes it hard for a bass to sit solidly in the mix because of the constant sonic shapeshifting. Following are some layering approaches that do work.
Three oscillators with two pitch detunings. Pan your main oscillator to center, and set it to be the loudest of the three by a few dB. Pan the other two oscillators somewhat left and right of center, and detune both of them four cents sharp. Yes, this will skew the overall sound a tiny bit sharp; think of it as the synth bass equivalent of "stretch" tuning.
Dual oscillators with detuning. You can get away with detuning more easily if there are only two oscillators, as the volume peaks and valleys are more predictable. Pan the two oscillators left and right of center, set them to the same approximate level, tune one oscillator four cents sharp, and tune the other four cents flat. If that's still too diffused, pan them both to center, tune one to pitch, detune the other one eight cents sharp, and reduce the level of the detuned oscillator by -3 to-6dB.
Three oscillators with multiple detunings. If you must shift one oscillator sharp and one flat in a three-oscillator setup, consider mixing the two shifted oscillators somewhat lower (e.g., -3 to -BdB) than the one-pitch oscillator panned to center. This will still give an animated sound, but reduce any diffusion.
Three oscillators with layered octaves. This is one of the most common Minimoog bass patches (Figure 1), and yes, it sounds very big. Adding a slight amount of detuning to the...