Bass (synth) sound design

[RobC]

It's easy to fall into the "trap" where hearing, or feeling the sub bass makes us believe, that we created a really impressive sound.

As such, I thought that maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to filter the note-frequency (I hope it's understandable what I mean), and then start the sound-design work like that. (This could likewise work for other sounds.)

It could be, of course, that people might already work this way. I haven't tried it yet. And of course, we would remove the filter when done (or replace it with a pure sine playing the same melody with envelopes applied to it).

The truth is, that in my opinion at least, it is the harmonics, that really make the sound, and not just the fundamental frequencies, not just the "body", or core elements of a sound.
So, I would be interested, what your unique approaches would be when designing basses, (or any sound)? How do you avoid getting "fooled" by those certain fundamental frequencies?

[selig]

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced what you describe. All sound is a balance of harmonics, and the fundamental is also a harmonic. That’s it, really, nothing more than that.

As for my personal EQ philosophy, I work with three main areas of every sound. The body, the presence, and occasionally the ‘mud’ (which typically falls between these two). Just like mixing three instruments together to make a final blend, with each element you have control over the frequency balances to create the ‘final blend’. Most of the time things are close to start with, but occasionally you may need to dig deeper to either find the body/presence or to remove enough mud for clarity. But if you work with samples and synths, you are lucky as you won’t have to do as much work with EQ as you MAY encounter when recording your own instruments/samples, or doing sound design.

Not sure if any of my blabbing here is helping, happy to redirect my thoughts if they are falling short of answering your question!

[RobC]

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced what you describe. All sound is a balance of harmonics, and the fundamental is also a harmonic. That’s it, really, nothing more than that.

As for my personal EQ philosophy, I work with three main areas of every sound. The body, the presence, and occasionally the ‘mud’ (which typically falls between these two). Just like mixing three instruments together to make a final blend, with each element you have control over the frequency balances to create the ‘final blend’. Most of the time things are close to start with, but occasionally you may need to dig deeper to either find the body/presence or to remove enough mud for clarity. But if you work with samples and synths, you are lucky as you won’t have to do as much work with EQ as you MAY encounter when recording your own instruments/samples, or doing sound design.

Not sure if any of my blabbing here is helping, happy to redirect my thoughts if they are falling short of answering your question!

The way I understood these english terms: the fundamentals being the most important, dominant frequencies; while harmonics being the frequencies that give it a character. Think of a kick, synthesized from a sine wave, where you have a click, a punch, and a rumble. That's what I thought of as fundamentals. Then, we'd perhaps add it some character with some distortion, or adding some noise to it, so it sounds less raw. Those I thought of as harmonics.
But at the end of the day, I guess I always got the terms wrong. x D

As for my sound design experiments, I actually experienced odd things when I loaded a rendered synth sound into NNXT. Then did sample loop, where I made the end point shorter and shorter, until I started hearing new sounds. That's obviously because the looped bit is as small as a wave cycle by then. It is very likely that some psychoacoustic weirdness happens by accident.
Other times, when synthesizing with FM, the sub frequencies can become weak, the more it's pushed.
I know, these are unusual examples, but these are the exact cases, where I definitely don't want my ears to tell me where the sweet spot is, according to how loud the sub bass frequencies are.

I think, I might work in a similar way like you. If I take a bass synth apart to the note frequencies, and the character - then I would experiment with designing those elements separately, as well as together. So yeah, much like mixing. But I'd also consider what interesting things I can do with psychoacoustics.
Last, but not least, it's worth considering that we may or may not hear certain things differently on headphones and on speakers.

Your input is always useful, and much appreciated, so thank you as always!
I admit, I tend to go into complicated realms of sound design, so I definitely need to add sound examples. Especially because some topics are hard to explain.