Neurobass Techniques

A Neurobass is a complex type of reese bass. Neurobasses are typically built to have complex, controllable movement parameters which a producer can "perform" through modulating these parameters.

Historically, sound design techniques have been gatekept, whether out of ego or lack of care to teach and spread understanding of such techniques; and the world of neurobass sound design has unfortunately been no different. Sound design has also been prey to the "Method" fallacy where producers learn a method to create a sound without understanding the underlying techniques used to create the sound, such that they do not actually gain proficiency in sound design. This article's intent is to clearly lay out any and all neurobass techniques, so if you have a technique that isn't listed here, feel free to add it yourself or suggest that it be added!

Oscillator Techniques

Basic Reese

A basic reese oscillator setup. The unison is set to 2 voices, and the detune controls how fast the beating is; more = faster.

The most basic form of a reese bass is a single saw wave with 2 voices of unison. This causes "beating" in the sound, where you can hear the phasing between the 2 detuned voices of the saw as another oscillation in amplitude and a phaser sound. This beating is controlled by the amount of detune on the unison voices, and the frequency of the note played; so higher pitches have faster beating! Pairs well with pitch bending in performance, for this reason.

As a note, in Vital, you should also go to the advanced tab and turn the stereo unison for your given oscillator all the way down to make it mono; otherwise you'll just be playing each voice hard panned apart from each other such that they don't interact. Be sure to check whether your unison is stereo in your synthesizer of choice.

This is a solid place to start a bass from, but its consistency and lack of control can make it hard to make unique. However, if you want that recognizable reese bass sound, this is perfect.

AU5 Reese Technique

In Vital, LFO 1 is 1/2 Tempo, ramps up from min to max, and is on the phase of Oscillator 2. This is then resynthesized to oscillator 3 to execute the technique.

In a short form video, the producer Au5 goes over a method of creating a more controllable / modern reese bass, using a wavetable synthesizer. This is confirmed possible in Vital and Serum 1 and 2.

The technique he uses to create a controllable beating saw is to create a single beat of the saw wave and resample that into a wavetable. This is done by using two identical saw waves, and then using a ramp up LFO to modulate the phase of one of them. Then, as the phase goes from 0 to 360, the moving saw loops and completes 1 "beat." Then, the entire patch can be resampled to another oscillator! Thus, in the final output, you get a wavetable such that moving through the wavetable from minimum to maximum value also completes 1 beat, as a single oscillator. This lets you control the beating of the saws and their pitch separately. This can then be applied to tempo sync the beating of the saws, by making the LFO modulating the wavetable of this single beating oscillator tempo synced.

This is a fantastic extension of the reese bass which grants the producer greater control over the aspects of the reese. However, there is at least one drawback, as witnessed on Vital. When resampling, there can be aliasing artifacts, where the final wavetable can have random inaccurate jagged edges moving through the frames of the wavetable. This shouldn't affect the final sound too meaningfully beyond causing inaccurate clicking, but it may sound particularly digital, which might not be what you're looking for in a reese bass, especially if you intend to use it with minimal processing.

Processing Techniques

Clipping the sound can square off the waveform of your neurobass, introducing harmonics and high end, and increasing the perceived loudness of your sound. This can be used effectively to prevent peaking in a chaotic patch, or creatively to fill out and give character to a bass.