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Subtractor, the original Reason synth, still packs a punch! In this tutorial we’ll learn the basics of this virtual analog classic by creating a synth bass from scratch. Subtractor is part of the full Reason Rack and is included with Reason+. If you’re new to Reason, Reason Free is a no-cost way to start with the Rack, and the synth basics here (oscillators, filters, envelopes, and an LFO) will help you with any synth you pick up.

Transcript

Intro: what is Subtractor?

In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at the original Reason synth, the Subtractor, and use it to make some nice synth sounds from scratch. Subtractor is a virtual analog synth with a few tricks up its sleeve, making it suitable for everything from classic basses and leads to shimmering bell sounds and quirky percussion.

Subtractor is still a beloved staple synth after over ten years. With all the controls logically laid out right on the front panel, it’s easy to explore and blazingly fast to go from idea to finished sound.

Creating a synth bass from a blank slate

So let’s dive right in and create a synth bass. Start by resetting the device to make sure we start with a blank slate.

The oscillator: a sawtooth waveform

In Subtractor, the oscillators, these things right here, produce the sound. We’ll start with the basic sawtooth waveform found in most analog synths. It’s a great starting point for most synthetic sounds.

Phase offset modulation

A unique feature of the Subtractor is its phase offset modulation, basically allowing you to subtract or multiply the waveform with a phase-offset copy of itself. This allows you to create entirely new waveforms. Pretty complicated, right? Luckily, it’s significantly harder to explain than it is to use. We can simply listen and tweak our way forward to a good sound. Nice.

The low-pass filter

This signal is then fed through the filter to shape it into something awesome. The LP next to the filter here stands for low-pass, letting the low frequencies pass through, and for a synth bass, that’s just what we want. If we set it to LP 24, we get an even sharper cutoff, letting even less high frequencies come through.

The filter envelope

The filter envelope changes how the filter behaves over time, so you can set it to slowly open or close, or set at what level it will be when you hold a key pressed. For a bass sound, we want it to be quite punchy, so a short, snappy decay is right on the money. Tweak the amount knob to make this effect a bit more pronounced.

Velocity and the filter

If we take a look down here under velocity, you can see that the velocity, that is, how hard we hit the keys, affects the filter frequency. This is great for some extra expression when playing. That’s a solid synth bass sound.

A second oscillator for a fatter sound

If we want to take this sound further, we could utilize the second oscillator and some modulation. Turning on oscillator 2 and setting it an octave lower than oscillator 1 instantly gives us a fatter sound.

What is an LFO? Adding motion to the bass

Now, to give it all some motion, we can use the LFO. LFO stands for low frequency oscillator. It’s a waveform that you can use to modulate different things. For example, if I select filter frequency as the destination here and turn up the amount, you can hear what happens. The filter frequency starts moving. We’ll turn down the rate of the LFO a bit, and suddenly our bass sound got a whole lot more interesting.

Wrap-up

So there you have it: how to create a bass sound from scratch with the Subtractor.