Razor Bass Tutorial

Not every tutorial here will be about creating custom synths and effects, or how to accomplish unbelievably complicated routing tasks. Some posts will feature some really great instruments available for Reaktor, like this Razor bass tutorial. Razor is the synth that sort of completes the collection for Native Instruments at this point. The already have an incredibly popular subtractive synth in Massive, one of the best FM synths available in FM8 and Absynth, which offers users the ability to design sounds using every kind of synthesis around, plus the added bonus of sample processing. So needless to say, NI fans were pretty thrilled when Razor was released as an official instrument. With a fresh sound and intuitive approach to working with sound, Razor is a great program that runs inside of an even greater program.

This Razor bass tutorial begins with DJ Vespers explaining how to load the synth in a project. Then a Formant waveform is loaded into the first oscillator. An envelope is set up and assigned to modulate the Formant knob of oscillator 1 to provide some of the movement in the synth’s initial delivery. (At this point he takes a moment to explain the ideas and mechanics behind additive synthesis and how some of Razor’s key feature actually work.)

He then assigns the same envelope to control the cutoff of a lowpass filter to further shape the sound and generate more movement and interest. Keytracking is enabled on the filter cutoff as well add brightness and variation between notes. Now a Band Reject filter is added to the mix. This filter’s cutoff parameter also has keytracking enabled and the same envelope is again assigned to modulate it, as well. An LFO is also assigned to modulate the cutoff of this band reject filter, for a slight wobble.

The Unisono Noise reverb effect is now inserted to make the sound bigger and also introduce more character from the noise element. The Speed knob of this effect is being modulated by the same LFO that is controlling the cutoff of the second filter. A Dirty Limiter is added to wrangle in the sound and provide a rough edge at the same time. The Spectral Clip and Safe Bass features are used to clean up the frequencies a bit to wrap this sound up.

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Cheers,
OhmLab