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Sol (I) brought in and set up a Harbinger Vari loudspeaker to better demonstrate the nights work, tips, and responses to questions. While waiting for members to arrive, Sol created a few bass sounds using Ableton's stock vocoder, Kilohearts Disperser, and Soft clip saturator plug-ins to demonstrate some usual EDM bass design techniques. Sol then prepared a demonstration of FM synthesis, in combination with modulation to create a-tonal high frequency layering sounds, which then were used to layer over the previously made sounds.
As people began to enter the room at around 7:30, Sol asked Buffy what they were interested in hearing about today, in which Buffy responded to by saying, "Just show me your process and sound design workflow".
Sol then proceeded to open a new Ableton project and begin working on a basic dubstep loop from scratch. They started the demonstration by using Serum, a wavetable synthesizer to create a very basic patch, and then showed off a processing chain consisting of equalizers, amp simulator plugins, and multiband compressors to create a monstrous, distorted growl sound. Sol then expanded upon his ideas with the sound he just created by explaining their sub bass process and how to mix and blend the two sounds together, by combining a high pass filter on the original sounds, and a low pass filter on the new sub bass sound.
The next technique that Sol explained was using a soft clip saturator on a routing folder group inside Ableton to drastically increase harmonic content and further blend the sounds together. He explained his reasoning for this being that, "since bass music is inherently very loud, you don't need to compress it as much, so combining a saturator and a soft clipper changes the harmonic content of both sounds together so they sound cohesive in the mix"
Sol then showed how to properly align the subbass to the transient of the bass sounds, to give the music a lot more swing and rhythm and how that can catch the ear of the listener, this along with dragging in a few pre-recorded drum samples allowed Sol to demonstrate how to create a quick 8 bar idea for a song.
The meeting wrapped up with Sol going over plug-ins from companies like Kilohearts and Slate digital, and demonstrating how to use them in an actual project by showing old projects, and sound design experiments.
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