Ive only recently in the last few months found out that a lot of people regularly layer a plain sine wave for the sub bass of a track. I do agree that sine waves do sound stronger and deeper than square waves, but I have a hard time mixing a higher layer with it because the sine wave is almost completely in-audible, as in you FEEL it, and not HEAR it....
Im not sure but im pretty sure in Shy fxs tunes he uses square waves, cos they just sound like that....
my question is does anyone know for sure that sine waves give a stronger, more solid bottom end? i.e.-to sound big compared to other commercial DnB, do you need to use a sine wave? I hope this makes sense!!!
you dont need to use a sine wave, but sine waves can produce really deep, really warm sounds (theres also a fair bit of science about the sine wave too, harmonics, fundamental freuqnecies etc but i aint too hot on that tbh), a lot of the time my sub bass comes from a reece sample where ive split the sound and used eq and a bit of distortion to turn the reece sample into sub bass, but it doesn't have to be a sine, or a square wave. if your struggling to mix a higher layer, try distortin the sine wave subtely, this will distort harmonic frequencies and give the sub bass a different character, making it a little grittier and should sit a bit better with higher layers of bass. eq is also gonna help a lot, roll off the lower layer and the higher layer making sure the respective eq curves kinda 'overlap' each other in terms of the frequency they both roll off at. im sure there are loads of scientific reasons why sine waves work well, but they're not the be all end all of creating decent sub bass.
Yo man, I’m not too good at explaining stuff, but a sine wave is a pure tone so there is only one frequency, where as the squarewave produces many different frequencies ontop, so it sounds the same note but has a different sound quality. Because a sine tone is only at one frequency, you will hav trouble tryin to eq it in the higher end. If ur processing ur basslines an distorting it, making it sound dirty for dnb etc, its good just to hav a sine wave on the bottom because it makes the note itself more clear (there was a really gud video posted with subfocus makin basslines an he used a sine wave in this way, an some other gud tips http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK1ocGVDibg I think the second part has bits on making basslines). I think tho if ur just using a preety clean square wave an it hasn’t got any dodgy panning or nething u could probably just eq it nice an u wouldn’t need a sine wave aswell. Hopefully u get what im on about, theres probably someone on the site who can explain this better lol. Safe. Timmi
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i'm still fairly new to wavforms (lol) as I used to use a lot of samples before. But recently after reading through the forums here I started to create my own.
This may sound like I'm repeating whats been sad on here on numerous occassions - you can get some really good results starting off with a single sine wav, to get more warmth you can add some distortion and filter the sonud back so it becomes cleaner at the same time retaining some of that gritty texture and compression works wonders so make sure u use that to really give presence to sound (tip from jimmy
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layering ur sub bass with a synth (2 saw wavs detuned most common example) to cover the mids played on the same notes as the sub will give you a full overall bass sound
lol hope i didn't go off topic, as for square wavs, haven't played around with them too much for subs so can't really give u a full answer im afraid, maybe try to apply the same technique to that compare the 2 and decide for yourself?
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