So i thought I'd make a thread that will help me and other drum & bass producers a like! What VST's do you like to use (and effects if you like) To make your Bass/Pads/Fx. Specify what sort of Drum & Bass you like to make with it and what you use the VST/Effect for (Bass/Pads/Fx/Everything)

Thanks guys :3

 

I suppose... NI Massive will win the game.

 

idk man massive is great and all but i dont know

 

massive spire sylenth, kontakt, fm8, absynth, grossbeat, glitch, effectrix, Ni driver, wow2, any other distortion/gating or momentary fx plug-ins. sharp eq's that can swipe but there are plenty of that and ofc a compresser with some balls and maybe a good transients manipulator, and a good reverb

And last but not least a sample of the amen drums, but that isn't necessary a plug-in.

 

Last edited: Sep 8, 2015

Subscribed, since i've loved dnb since the jungle days of the 1990s and through the best times of it morphing and changing into all of the subgenres of today. Liquid dnb will always be my favourite style of music!

 

Half time moody minimal & cinematic

Omnisphere 2
Geist
Looperator
Mux modular
Aether
Turnado
Various acustica & nebula
Maul
Kontakt libraries
The Drop
Mjuc
DC8C
SDRR
Strobe

 

Last edited: Sep 8, 2015

Punchy kicks (ex : Black Octopus)
Punchy snares
Hihats/percs loops/hits
Agressive synth (Sytrus/FM8...)/distortion (Ohmicide...)

In fact, there are no unique way, especially for DnB.
PS : Skrillex Dubstep agressive bass were not made with Massive, but FM8 ;) ppl talk about Massive for agressive/modulated basses because there are a lot of tutorials. To me, Sytrus do better in this domain.

 

I personally use:
Sound Generation (Pads, Bass):
Serum, Spire, Sylenth 1, Guitar Rig 5, Synth 1, FM8, Kontakt 5 (Specifically the portamento sliding on loop sample portions. I got this tip from Black Sun Empires tutorial on Youtube), Sytrus. Bass generation mostly, but pads can easily be made with the kontakt setup and reverb.

Pads:
Paul stretch and granular synthesis is the way to go for truly innovative pad design, not to say it isnt possible with a single soft synth but you end up having to modulate a crap ton of parameters to get to the end result, and it isnt as modifiable as granular synthesis IMO.

Saturation / Warmth / Band pass effects on bass:
CamelPhat3(Amazing band pass and limiting capabilites), Satson Channel, Britson Channel(Both channels can add nice saturation) Fab Filter Saturn, TB Reelbus/TB Ferox. (The tonebooster plugs are great on drum masters). Redopter (D16 plugs are really good), easy to modulate. T-Racks Clipper is also good or fruity waveshaper. I find T-Racks to be good in small amounts but if i want real control fruity waveshaper is the way to go because you can literally draw the waveform.

Misc Effects: Flanging and Phasing, in lots of different amounts. using the free "classic flanger and classic phaser". D16's phaser they released recently also looks amazing, but have yet to try.

Impulse Response/ Distortion/ Convolution:
iZotope Trash 2(Really good plug for adding crunch and a bit of wet that isnt just reverb, its amp based response from a mic so it sounds better imo). Ridiculous multiband distortion capabilities. You can also fake this sound slightly using Waves doubler, which i think EmperorDNB uses, if you have watched his livestreams or vids.

Compression:
Pro-C & Pro-C 2 if it ever comes out on PC :P (Mid-Side Comp + mixing dry and wet signal is dreamy),T-Racks (warm sounding),Tokyo Labs Comps (accurate and hard, but very responsive), The Glue, Maximus (Very good on bass alone but leaves a lot of maximus artifacts, which i sometimes find overly audible on source material).

Granulizing:
Fruity Granulizer, Harmor (Where most of Fruity Loop users neuro DNB comes from)

Reverb:
Fusion Fields, or any convolution based reverb (Waves has one). Valhalla shimmer is great.

Monoizing and stereoizing plugs:
Nugen Monoizer/Stereoizer. (Good for old school breaks, to keep monos in the low freqs).

Drumatic + Superior Drummer or any other drum library:
People nowadays are making huge hybrid drum stacks to get the perfect drums, a mixture of hard hitting 808's and FM Synth for snares because they have clean transients, and then reinforce them with their own breaks, which have had their mic bleeds heavily altered and have had a lot of changes made to them to make them sound explosive, but fit in the mix with the digital drums.

Theres prolly some others stuff ive forgotten, but the main bulk that ive been using recently is there.

 

Nobody use RP's Predator?
It's probably the only RP synth I still like, and imho can be quite on spot for DnB

The, I find Serum effective and straight-forward for heavily modulated basses.
I got some nice wobbly basses out of it in no time...
Anyway, you can get good result with many other synths, a lot already mentioned here,
but I prefer to focus on a few selected good tools, instead of using 15synths in a track
without knowing any of them inside out, I try to just get the most out of a chosen synth I decided to spend my time to learn in all its capabilities...

 

Last edited: Sep 8, 2015

Rob Papen SubBoomBass also

 

So god damn lucky! So envious right now :P

 

banging reply

 

Me too... LTJ Bukem got me hooked

 

ah I forgot slicex is also cross daw so add that
and while you at it download all rob papen plug-ins illegally, if you use it or not does not matter because that pisses him off anywayz. and I hate the arrogant bastard (as far as that can go for somebody I've never met)

 

Back to the old school

in the early '90 I use to live in london. At that time there were no vst's, no plugins, no hd recording, nothing.
We use to produce drum&bass with a Juno 106 and a Casio fz1 sampler. Everything was sequenced from a Roland mc500





This was the recipe:

1. Sample a chord from juno
2. Play The Winstons - Amen Brother break from samples
   
3. Play an enormous bass, with a lot of vcf moving slider
4. Randomly Play sampled chord on various notes
5. Play a jamaican ragga acappella from turntable
6. Record the final result on dat
7. Press the 300 Vinyl copies (white sleeve)

lot of fun!!

For you, samples pervert here's a documentary on the "Amen" break