Dubstep Formant Lead
Unless you have been living under the rock for the last couple of years, you probably have heard dubstep, whether you were aware of it or not. This genre needs no introduction for many people, however, for those who would like to know a bit more of its origins let’s say that it draws its roots from 90`s UK Garage, Drum & Bass, Jungle and of course Dub. Nowadays it has evolved into something utterly unique in terms of sound design as well as music production. First of all, it is known for its heavy beats with a particular accent on the snare drums, and screaming synth and bass leads with the tempo set usually at 140 BPM. In the next tutorial, I will try to demonstrate how to make one of the most common sounds heard in this kind of music. So let’s get started!
Let’s start oscillating!
Firstly, let`s add a new instance of Massive by Native Instruments on the newly made MIDI channel in Lumit. Additionally, I’ll start with clean initial preset and move to the first oscillator section. Here I will choose a basic Square waveform and decrease the pitch of the oscillator by a few octaves. Next, from the mode menu, I will select “Formant“ mode. With the oscillator parameters set like this, we got a high pitched sound.
~Oscillator 1 with Formant mode
Also, I will add a second oscillator, with let’s say F-Saw waveform also pitched down by a few octaves to get some low end.
~Oscillator 1 & 2
Now, to get closer to that screaming type of lead let`s add a filter in Scream mode. With Cutoff parameter set to the right, Scream parameter on 12 o’clock, and Resonance to the right as well.
~Oscillator 1 & 2 with Filter in scream mode
Screaming Formant
To make things more interesting, let’s modulate the Intensity knob of the two oscillators by using LFO performer found in the middle section of Massive. As you can see below, I made a short sequence in the performer section. After that, I just dragged and dropped the cursor icon to the intensity knob in the oscillators section. Furthermore, we could add a Dimension expander as an effect to get a wider stereo sound. Let’s hear now how everything sounds with some previously made rhythm.
~Final Lead with Rhythm
Download the patch here.
