Cubase 14: Create Driving Bass Sounds

All the settings required for our Retrologue bass synth sound can be accessed from a single page of the GUI.

Explore the world of bass synth sound design with Cubase’s Retrologue and HALion Sonic.

Whether in electronic music or contemporary film, TV or game scores, powerful pulsing bass synth sounds are often used to drive the music or visual action along. If you want such a sound, you might get lucky searching for the perfect preset — but designing your own is not only satisfying, but will also ensure you get a sound that’s a perfect fit. It’s something that you can easily do in Cubase Artist/Pro’s Retrologue 2 synth plug‑in. And while Elements users could buy that synth separately, they already have access to HALion Sonic, which is more than capable enough for the job. So let’s get rolling some DIY driving bass synth sounds...

Bass‑ics

Bass synth patches come in all sorts of sonic shapes and sizes, so before we start we need a target in mind. We’ll aim for something that can provide a pulse‑like rhythmic element, and that perhaps suggests a fast attack and a short release, allowing short staccato notes to be played without a rapid progression of notes getting in the way of each other. I’d also like it to be dynamic. In this case, I’m thinking it should provide a solid (maybe slightly subdued?) low‑end tone for any low‑intensity sections of our project, but, while retaining that low‑end foundation, it should also be able to get more strident (maybe more aggressive?) when greater intensity is required. Finally, I’d like to be able to gradually transition between these two sonic characters in real time, which means we may need to include some velocity or controller‑based parameter modulation.

Retrologue 2 makes all of this mercifully straightforward. Indeed, all the settings I needed to create this sound can be seen in the first screenshot, and I was able to configure them without leaving the main Synth page of the GUI. So, let’s now break down just how I arrived at this configuration. And if you want to hear how the sound evolves through the stages I describe below, check out the audio examples that we’ve made available on the SOS website at https://sosm.ag/cubase-0925.

Solid...