Use Parallel Distortion to Spice Up Your Bass

Using a Parallel Compressor

We have covered parallel compression in one of our previous blog articles. It's a technique whereby you use the compressor as a send effect (traditionally used as an insert) so that the dry and compressed signals run in parallel. It's a valuable technique for better blending the clean and processed signal. Consequently, it's used widely among some of the best music producers. In the following blog, I would like to show you how you can use a similar approach to add more harmonic content to your bass sound. I am talking about Parallel Distortion.

To summarize, it is done by making a new auxiliary (send/return) track, inserting a distortion plugin (or effects unit) of your choice, and sending it to the track you wish to distort. By pushing the drive and tweaking the tone, you will hear the effect generate new harmonics at the higher frequencies on the bass. This may help thicken the sound further and make it more prominent in the mix, but it can clash with other instruments. However, there is no justification for adding a lot of high-frequency harmonics from distortion only to cut them out again with an EQ when you mix.  

Let's Start Distorting

I have previously made a short bass sequence using Scarbee MM-Bass ( a realistic-sounding live bass instrument found within Kontakt by Native Instruments). This is how it sounds unaffected.

~Unprocessed Bass sound  

Get Your Tweak On

I will create a new return track within SoundBridge and place a distortion plugin on it. In this case, I have chosen Saturn by Fabfilter. You can see that Saturn has three bands, each with a different kind of distortion. These bands can be wide or narrow depending on which part of the frequency spectrum you want to affect with distortion. Therefore, this multi-band kind of distortion is pretty helpful, in my opinion. Once I finish tweaking the distortion parameters, I'll blend it to the clean signal. By combining the processed (distorted signal) with our original signal using the send fader on the bass track, we can hear a significant change in the overall sound.

Last, I will duplicate the bass channel, place a Q10 plugin by Waves, and apply a Pseudo stereo preset. This is because I want to make the bass sound a bit wider. In some of our earlier blog articles, we have covered the pseudo-stereo technique in detail. In the end, let us hear the processed sound solo accompanied by rhythm.

~Parallel Processed Bass sound

~Parallel Processed Bass sound + Rhythm