Earth shattering bass

Hey people!

I got my OP-1 for quite some time now but I cant seem to get a very strong earth shattering bass with it.

…for House, Techno…most of my stuff often sounds really flat and I don‘t know why.
Any thoughts? I would love to hear how others create strong and driving basslines.

i sample yamaha dx and roland jx tones through a pultec valve EQ. it’s famed for fat bass. no need to use any of the effects on the OP1 after that.

pultecs are expensive (around $1500, i think). but you can build one for under $400, depending on what transformers you use.

the moog bass pedal ( mf-101 moogerfooger low pass filter ), that are around $250, look like they would make a good eq, but i haven’t used one.

one thing i noticed – at high volume, the bass sounds flat. i guess it eats up all the headroom or something like that. turning the volume down can make it kick more.

Hmmmm…do you have sample patches for the OP-1 you could share? I would really like to know what it sounds like :wink:

i’ll go through my samples and find some pultec EQed stuff and send you a message.
i’ve found a folder of drums from old house and disco records sampled through the pultec. having a bit more trouble locating the right bass samples.

@squiddly said:
i’ll go through my samples and find some pultec EQed stuff and send you a message.
i’ve found a folder of drums from old house and disco records sampled through the pultec. having a bit more trouble locating the right bass samples.

that would be huge! Thank you.

Just looked at pultec EQs. Wow! They are just wow! The pultec seems like the best EQ out there but I think the original one with tubes ist just the best. There are some DIY’s for about 600 or something but I can’t imagine they would come close to the original oldscool ones.

Building one in the most classic way would be a cool project. Expensive but extremely cool. Routing all your music experiences through it would add a lot to it I guess.

@adge said:
Any thoughts? I would love to hear how others create strong and driving basslines.

No particular EQ will fix your bass for you. Take the kick and the bass, and figure out how to negotiate the time and the spectrum between the two, and shape them towards that. Once you have motion and groove, build some contrast into that bass mix and make it dynamic, which also means compressing it just the right amount so that it’s fat but not still. No compressor will compress just the right amount for you, or with the right attack, or release, though some saturators work better than clean workhorse compressors. It all goes by ear. Finally, do have moments in which there isn’t as much bass, so when there is, it sounds as if it’s louder.

Could be the OP1 isn’t the machine to give you the bass you’re looking for. As a synth it’s not great. May be as a sampler, with the right sounds.

i get fat bass out of op1 all the time. dr. wave & cluster are prolly my go-to’s

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@adge…i’ve put samples in dropbox folder and sent you a link.

re building a pultec…you don’t lose any quality with home builds. often you can make a better piece of gear. pultecs are very simple. there aren’t a lot of parts. and, unlike a commercial venture, you can buy the best components – a $4.00 component rather than the $2.00 component – without any noticeable effect on your price.

but i imagine that you can get some pretty good bass tones and eq-ing, compressing in Logic and other DAWs.

Here are all bass patches I have on my OP-1. One is a “classic” heavy techno bass. Some pretty crazy and weird.

If you need something even heavier, you can use DBox. If you need something even heavier than that, you can stack multiple DBox notes through a sequencer. That gets pretty distorted, though.

Edit:
How I wish OP-1 had name and folder management features on the synth itself. Or at least it should keep patch sample within the file when you save it to snapshots, instead of overwriting them with “o p one patch”.

Here is a run-through with and without FX.

I’m attaching the exact set of patches I used in the demo above, since I added some tweaks. Let me know what you think.

One of the best things for powerful bass is the hidden OP-1 Filter FX. It’s used on the very firs sound in the set. It’s great for controlling volume, since you can drive the sound. Probably would work especially well with DSynth, since that thing is pretty quiet on many settings.

You can also make a heavy-hitting bass by looping a single cycle or even part of a cycle from certain samples.

@Gambler said:

One of the best things for powerful bass is the hidden OP-1 Filter FX.

Is that custom FW only?

No, you just transfer a patch where they used the hidden filter. Then you can change your sound with the BIG 1, 2, 3, 4 buttons.
You will find the link somewhere in the custom firmware thread.

@mgrey here you go! just download and load it to the op-1
https://op1.fun/users/wavi/patches/wavi_wonky_bass

Thanks adge!