Some of the more veteran dubsteppers amongst the readership here may remember the fateful day - probably in early 2007 - that they heard Coki's track "Spongebob". Arguably the first "wobble" track, it divided opinions in the scene, but it ushered in a sound that was here to stay. These days, when people say "dubstep" they're usually thinking of that high pitched squeal - "filth" to many. It's an essential part of the sound in 2011, and in the UK there have even been chart hits featuring it. So lets take a look at this mainstay of a scene...The wobble, or filth, sound is now fully established in many genres besides dubstep; from drum & bass, to moombahton, to electro house and breaks. It's characterised by a harsh, distorted, high pitched lead type noise. The classic wobble was created by assigning the cut-off of a filter to a bass sound. Simple. Modulate the cut-off frequency, and you have a basic wobble. But this has been around for a long time, and has been taken to the next level by the new generation.
There's little point in explaining in detail here exactly how to make a good wobble - simply google for "how "to make a dubstep bass' and put in your favoured synth. Ableton's Operator, Logic's ES2, N.I. Massive and plenty more are perfectly capable of making these gritty squeals, and there are tutorials for all of the above on youtube - simply put in your DAW of choice and get searching. It's not about which synth you've got! What they don't do is tell you how to use a wobble once you've made it.
One thing to note is that a wobble doesn't really have any bass in it. It's all about the upper and midrange squeal, with a sub layered underneath. This makes it a lot easier to work with; just filter off anything below about 150Hz, and once you're done, add in a simple sine tone under the bassline. This will help you avoid any clashing caused by extreme processing, resonant peaks and so on.
The next big factor is that a simple squeal gets very boring, very quickly. Listen to some of the masters of the sound (the likes of Reso and Datsik) and you'll hear that they don't just use one sound - instead, there are several (dozens, even) of wobble sounds used in a track, and this helps keep a track interesting, hyped, and full of energy. Notice too how they can quantise the sounds to a shuffle pattern, and really get detailed with the rhythms - this gives the track lots more energy.To vary up the wobble sounds in your track you should be using lots of synths, duplicated across several channels, each with different filter and distortion settings. Then you can use a different channel for each bar, or even - if you want to get technical - each note. The alternative would be to bounce a note of each sound down to audio and work with that instead. This can reduce flexibility when it comes to mixing down, but it can also speed things up too; you're less likely to spend lots of time tinkering with each sound and can get onto the next thing quickly. Or, you can load your bounced audio into a sample, then you can filter, loop, retrigger and repitch your wobbles to create some truly hideous noises - ideal for the dancefloor!
When mixing down, you need to remember that if it's going to melt anyone's face off - as they're particularly keen on, Stateside - then it needs a lot of screamingly harsh top end. 4Khz boosts will help here; as will more distortion, exciters and even sending your sounds off to a high-passed buss in parallel. But just as you normally may need to sidechain a sub-bass to avoid clashing with a kick, so with wobbles you should consider sidechaining the wobble off your snare to let it slice through the mix effectively. It may even be worth doing the same with your vocal sample too. You could, however, just cut out the audio from the wobble sound so that it's not playing when a snare hits - often this can heighten the rhythmic aspect of the bassline too.
So, writing a filthy dubstep tune can have some depth after all - Lord knows, this author gets enough identikit demos with boring one-note wobbles, but if you follow some of these tips you can be writing energetic dancefloor bombs like the best. So fire up your favourite synth, check out some tutorials, and have this article to hand as you crank up the distortion!
