next in line would be bass, as there aren't many synths that seem to do really good bass; I don't mean trance bass, but DnB type stuff that you hear tearing through the dark drum n bass...

just as a side note mate...most drum n bass producers program their bass using multiple instances with each layer finely tuned to specific frequency ranges...it is not impossible to do this with psyn...you just have to roll up your sleeves...and get to tweakin' anyway... just a thought....peace.

Do you have a link to a Tera demo? Im too lazy to go find it.

ORIGINAL: wrench45us


the best synth i've heard for bass is Tera

the majority of presets are some euro cheese version of somebody else's impression of dance bass
but with just a little tweaking the cheese is squeezed out and and with a little compression they can be really great -- nice punch and still enough mid-range register to give the bass some shape in a mix
Tera can do a lot of things really well, but gets only periodic visibility

This is the problem with a lot of softsynths though, in that too many of their presets are aimed at the trance crowd. I have played with Tera in the past and it had a nice sound to it, but it wasn't exactly an easy to use synth...in some respects, D'Cota was a nice compromise but it appears to be a dead product.

Absynth has surprisingly good basses as well -- not quite the 'body' that Tera manages -- but very well esp. for as well as it does so many other things

I like the sound of Absynth too, but I could never get comfortable with it's interface. Try as I might, I never managed to make any decent presets for it, so it would mean buying it just to use the bundled sounds, which isn't what I like to do (especially as many of the Absynth presets would be pretty easy to spot in track). Some synths just don't click for me and no amount of manual reading will help with the ergonomics of the interface...

it's true a lot of synths are weak and thin on bass, no matter what you do.
for free Triangle II has a number of very usable presets for bass

another good one for FM bass (but a little limited and probably dated) by now is Hydra

Never really use FM bass. T2 does have some nice basses...I have also found that Iblit is pretty good for bass too. Muon Tau Pro is capable of some good stuff in that area as well.

The best bass synth I have heard recently is actually for Buzztracker, it's called Square Space and has a really nice solid sound to it, without any effecting at all...shame it isn't available as a VST