DubSub

TL;DW: DubSub is a fully featured bass doctor.

DubSub

Be careful what you wish for. I like making plugins with very few controls, but when you have to use ALL the controls…

Here’s how it works. The top section, Treble Grind, is like a bass guitar presence circuit. You shouldn’t use that for hi-fi purposes, if you want clean pass-through use the Dry/Wet. Treble Grind works like a distortion, and has an Inverse/Out control allowing you to subtract it as well as add it. ‘zero’ is in the middle.

Crossover determines what goes to the Treble Grind, and what goes to the bass sections. To make it track bass better, set the crossover low.

Bass Drive is how hard you’re pushing the main bass section. It’s essentially an adjustable Head Bump control like in ToTape. Bass Voicing controls the depth of the bass boost: setting it higher up sounds more like overdriving a bass amp. Bass Inv/Out is the same as in the Treble Grind section, an ‘attenuverter’ like in certain Eurorack modules: it lets you subtract the bass, not just add it.

Sub Drive, Sub Voicing, and Sub Inv/Out are much like the bass section, except they work on an octave-divided version of the bass section. This helps it get good octave-down sounds some of the time, but it’s not anything like a digital suboctave synthesizer: it’s working crudely like an analog octave divider, which means it can make horrible noises if it doesn’t have clean signal to work with. This is of course intentional :) if you want it to do a recognizable sub-note, feed it a carefully controlled signal off a single track. Or, you can set it very deep and not mix in all that much of it, and get an interesting effect sound. For cleaner deep bass, work with the main bass section, or voice both of them very deep in hopes of cleaning up the sub-bass section a little by refusing to let it have more complicated signals.

All this work is supported by my Patreon, and there’s more work to be done: as I was finishing this one up (in the dual-mono capable form that the original DubSub used) I realized that it would be possible to do one that only worked in stereo, and produced only a mono bass and sub channel. Possibly also minus the treble grind, as the mono-bass one would be more of a mix tool: I don’t know, I could keep the grind if people used it. The point being, I can make one where the added bass is always mono (not true of original DubSub, or FathomFive, or even ToTape) and that’ll be useful, but it’ll also make the added bass info very obviously centered, possibly not sounding like part of a stereo track at all (if the stereo track has more complicated bass imaging). On the other hand, it’ll be way better for lows reinforcement on tracks, particularly EDM.

So, I’m not done working and I have some decisions to make. I’m going to do the mono-bass version, but let me know if it would be helpful to skip stuff that might never find practical use. I’m not sure the grind and crossover (or maybe even the sub) have a place in that context, and I could make one where crossover is always low (like 0) and maybe bass and sub voicings are linked? The key parts would be bass and sub inv/out and most likely bass and sub drive being independent (so you could just hint at some sub-octave but drive the bass harder for some compression-like activity).

Or it could be literally exactly DubSub but with mono bass.

Or one of each, so people interested in a more focussed plugin could have that :)

Enjoy DubSub, and I’ll see where the mono thing takes me. Let me know what sounds desirable!