BASSYNTH: filthy, gritty and epically modern bass making soft synth
Wave Alchemy BASSYNTH · Source: Wave Alchemy
Wave Alchemy BASSYNTH Perform page · Source: Wave Alchemy
Wave Alchemy BASSYNTH Browser page · Source: Wave Alchemy
Wave Alchemy BASSYNTH Sound Design page · Source: Wave Alchemy
Wave Alchemy BASSYNTH Tone page · Source: Wave Alchemy
Wave Alchemy BASSYNTH Mix page · Source: Wave Alchemy
Wave Alchemy BASSYNTH Motion page · Source: Wave Alchemy
Wave Alchemy has released BASSYNTH which they believe to be an entirely new kind of bass engine. The sounds are built from a combination of multi-sampled sound sources, oscillators and wavetables tied up in a very engaging and organic interface.
BASSYNTH
We love a bit of bottom end and BASSYNTH has it in shovel fulls of organic sound and motion. They sampled a massively diverse range of instruments, synths, noises, clangs, bangs, scrapes, splats and wobbles to put together an 11GB sound library. They sampled brass, strings, percussion, guitars, they bowed things, struck then, twanged them and tortured them down to the process out the bassiest of bottom ends. They then combine that with virtual oscillators and scannable wavetables to offer up a unique blend of low frequencies that they claim to be inspiring and possibly even visionary.
The promo video certainly makes it look like fun!
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Layering
BASSYNTH is all about the layers. There are 4 layers to play with which can be drawn from the sample library, oscillator section or choice of wavetables. Each layer has its own set of sound design parameters such as filters, envelopes, EQ, modulation, effects and up to 8 voice unison. There are over 40 effects to choose from and each voice gets 6 slots for processing.
Modulation
You can mess with the sound in a number of ways. Firstly there’s an XY pad interface into which you can hook up to 64 parameters. Fiddling around in there you can morph from pretty much everything to everything else with the slide of a finger or turn of a knob. You can do things the old fashioned way with modulation sources within the sound design pages consisting of 3 envelopes and 4 LFOs. Or you can employ the Motion Designer that’ll sequence, mutate and morph any of 8 macros that you’ve dropped parameters onto.
The Familiar Future of Bass?
All of it sounds very impressive. When you start digging into it you discover that it’s based in the Kontakt engine and so it all suddenly becomes very familiar and that, for me, takes away a bit of the edginess and innovation. We’ve been here before, we’ve seen multi-layered sampled synths with effects and motion modulation engines – it’s the standard feature set of a Kontakt instrument. However, after getting over that slight disappointment that this is not as new as it seems it all comes down to that sample library and how well these things are put together. I think the combination of synths and instruments is a great one that does give it an organic edge. In the demos they tend to kick off with the brass sounds which is unexpected but a bit of surprise in the overcrowded world of bass sounds is very welcome. There’s a lot you can do in here and familiarity is no bad thing.
BASSYNTH is available now for Kontakt Player for a deal price of £119.96 until the end of September.
More information
- Wave Alchemy BASSYNTH webpage.
Video
Here’s an intro to the BASSYNTH from Wave Alchemy and below is a demo from Bo Beats for another perspective.
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