Bass is half of what makes music enjoyable. I just made that up, and I’m not trying to take credit or anything, but I feel it’s true. Just try listening to music with all sound below 250 Hz cut away, and you’ll wish for the successor to the transistor radio real quick. Bass completes music, it’s the foundation and an important part of what makes the music and the listener intergroove.
You can EQ bass, you can play a low bass note. But a dedicated bass synth instrument is not something we get very often, not in purebred VST format that’s not emulating a piece of hardware anyway. Sure, there’s a few handfuls on the market already, some better than others, but they’re few compared to the sea of “do it all” synths for sure. Beatsurfing have already released Random (read the review), a wild sound generator capable of making some mean bass sounds – and even sounds similar to a flute. But their intention with LOW comes with the name. This monophonic bass synth plugin is for creating low end.
Straight to the bottom
What gives LOW a flying start is its range of well executed presets that let you hear the lows, mids and highs in action, modulating across the different engines. These engines resemble, in concept at least, the matter engines in Random, but you’ll probably find it harder to create stand out bass sounds off the bat just by moving a slider a bit. This is really the big difference to Random, that LOW is only for bass, and in such, everything in LOW is about fine tuning.
VIDEO: LOW by BEATSURFING | Sound design
While it was quite easy, maybe too easy, to create sounds and morph them in Random, thanks to the extremities of the X-Y field, LOW takes a different and more tactile and technical approach. The patches play very well, but it’s quite an effort to create something of your own by drawing in the 6 curves on the Oscillator page, and additionally 6 curves on the Filters page to your liking. Add to this your choice of engine and the seed, which is like a variation within the engine, and patch creation suddenly seems quite time consuming. So here’s what I’m thinking out loud to myself for next time I’m pre-planning anything: LOW is for when you know what you want in terms of bass sound, providing you with the precision tools to get there. And that’s why there’s probably no randomization button either – even though I would have loved one.
So how does it sound?
I’m always amazed by bass music artists and how well defined their low end is. Huge 808 kicks, subsonic rumbles. And when I fiddle through my folders of 808s, they often feel flat and lifeless. This is where LOW can make a difference, either creating whole kicks or bass notes, or layers for assembly of more complicated, constructed sounds. You should be interested in LOW for this reason, it’s really a dedicated tool for creating solid low end. If you’re into bass music, drum and bass, hip hop, EDM, modern jazz, neurofunk – well anything, really! – LOW is there for you with a palette of sounds and shapes to generate them with.
Fuzzy, sharp, hollow. The bass sounds LOW can generate are as varied as you could imagine. But you have to get used to the way this plugin works with the audio spectrum, as there’s not any traditional filters or EQ curves as we know them to make adjustments. Instead you model your sound across the two main pages of the plugin.
Harder, better, slower, heavier
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The Oscillator section on the first available page takes care of curves for engine gain, mutation, color and bottom, while the Filters page does High, Mid and Low impact and High, Mid and Low Body. It sounds like a lot, and actually, it is exactly that. In total, LOW presents six windows for loading up basic curve shapes and free style pen drawing on top of them, and they all affect the sound. But they each do this very precisely and not to a very extreme degree from just drawing or warping (curve locked, dragged around for new positions).
I’m just going to mention again how easy it was to make Random, BEATSURFING’s other bass capable plugin, generate something wild. LOW doesn´t play like that. LOW is for creating nasty low end with glimmer across the mids and highs. And it does it really well, even if the method requires a lot more steps to actually get to a point where a patch feels new, its own and finished.
I should mention the one thing that bugged me in LOW in its version 1.0.1 state reviewed here: You can’t automate the dragging of the cursor in a given window while the function is set to warp, meaning you move the set curve around in time (X) and intensity (Y). This would have been awesome to create your own movement on automation lanes, on top of the movement generated on the timelines in each window. I was really missing this feature during the review, as mouse warping is one of the most noticeable sound changes, and you can do it right there on the spot. It would also help with edits to be able to do straight lines or curves with a companion tool to the freehand pen. I hope these features can be added down the line.
Summary
To sum up though, I really recommend LOW to anyone digging deep into sound design. It’s a great plugin for creating custom bass sounds for drums and bass lines, but only if you know where you are going. For people wanting the presets and just go, that’s an option as well. But really, the meat of this plugin is in the curves and the intermodulation of these, plus of course the characteristics of each engine. It’s going to take a while to get accustomed to, but LOW rewards hard work and time spent. The presets are just the gateway…
