A wobble bass is the rhythmic wub of dubstep and a lot of bass music. You make it by taking a bass patch and using an LFO to open and close a low-pass filter in time with the tempo, so the tone breathes in a rhythm. Add resonance and distortion for the aggressive growl, switch the LFO rate through the bar for movement, and keep a clean sub underneath so the low end stays solid.
The idea works on almost any synth, in any DAW or a browser instrument. The parts, an LFO on a filter, resonance, distortion and a clean sub, mean the same thing wherever you meet them. None of this is tied to one product.
A wobble bass is a bass sound whose tone opens and closes in a repeating rhythm, giving the wub wub you hear in dubstep and a lot of bass music. It is not a special oscillator or a hidden preset. It is an ordinary bass patch with rhythmic movement added on top, and that movement almost always comes from an LFO, a low frequency oscillator, pointed at a filter so the tone sweeps brighter and darker over and over.
The whole effect is a short recipe. You start with a bass source that has plenty of harmonics, you set an LFO to sweep a low-pass filter and lock it to the tempo, you add resonance and distortion so each sweep growls, you change the LFO rate as the bar goes on so it moves, and you keep a clean sub underneath to hold the bottom. Each of those is a separate choice, and the rest of this page walks through them one at a time.
| Part | What it decides | Rule of thumb |
|---|---|---|
| Source | The raw tone the wobble shapes | A saw, or a detuned reese for a thicker, moving tone |
| LFO on filter | The wobble itself | Sweep the low-pass cutoff, synced to the beat |
| Resonance | The vocal, talking edge | Enough to sing, not so much it screams |
| Distortion | The aggressive growl | Drive it until it bites, then ease back |
| Rate changes | Movement across the bar | Switch note values so it feels played |
| Clean sub | A solid low end | A separate sine on the root, mono and untouched |
One piece of context first. Dubstep and most heavy wobble music is usually written at around 140 BPM, but the drums are often felt in half time, so the kick and snare land like a groove closer to 70. That leaves a lot of space between hits, which is exactly the room the bass fills by wobbling. The tempo you sync the LFO to is still the real 140, even when the track feels slower.
Put an LFO on the low-pass filter cutoff of a bass patch and sync its rate to a note value, so the filter opens and closes in time and the tone wobbles with the beat. That single routing, an LFO pointed at a filter and locked to the tempo, is the wobble. Everything else is flavour on top.
The filter can only sweep tone that is already there, so start with a source full of harmonics rather than a pure sine. A single sawtooth works and is the classic starting point. A step up is a reese, two or more sawtooths detuned slightly against each other so they beat and move on their own, which gives a thicker, already growling tone for the filter to shape. If you want the underlying patch solid before you add movement, the how to make a bass sound guide covers picking the oscillator and shaping it, and there is a separate how to make a reese bass guide for that detuned source in particular.
Assign an LFO to the low-pass filter cutoff. Set its depth so the tone travels from dark to bright and back, and pick a shape: a sine or triangle glides for a smooth, rounded wub, while a square jumps between two values for an on and off gate. The step that turns a random waver into a wobble is tempo sync. Instead of a free rate in hertz, lock the LFO to a musical note value so every sweep lands in time with the track. If the LFO controls are new to you, our guide on what an LFO is covers rate, depth, shape and sync in full.
The synced rate sets how fast the bass wobbles. Slower note values give a heavy, spaced wub; faster ones give a busy flutter that edges toward a pitch. The table shows common rates at a 4/4 bar, counted as how many full sweeps land in the bar.
| Rate (synced) | Sweeps per 4/4 bar | Character |
|---|---|---|
| 1/4 note | 4 | Slow and heavy, one long wub per beat |
| 1/8 note | 8 | The classic wobble speed |
| 1/16 note | 16 | Fast and buzzy, nearly a tone in itself |
| 1/8 triplet | 12 | Rolling, a swung three against two feel |
| Dotted 1/8 | about 5.3 | Does not line up evenly, so it pushes across the beat |
| 1/16 triplet | 24 | Very fast, a growl on its own |
The plain values, 1/4, 1/8 and 1/16, sit squarely on the grid and feel steady. The triplet and dotted values do not divide the bar evenly, which is exactly why they add swing and syncopation instead of a straight pulse. There is no correct choice; the rate is a big part of the groove, and switching between them is how the part stays alive, which is the last section below.
The growl comes from resonance on the filter plus distortion or waveshaping on the sound. Between them they add harmonics and edge, so each sweep bites rather than sounds soft and polite. A clean filter sweep on a clean saw is a wobble; add these two and it becomes the aggressive wobble people mean by the word.
Resonance emphasises the frequencies right at the cutoff point. As the LFO sweeps the cutoff up and down, that emphasised peak sweeps with it, and that moving peak is the vocal, talking quality of a good wobble. A little brings the sweep forward; a lot makes it sing and howl. Push it too far and the filter can turn piercing or start to self-oscillate into a whistle, so bring it up until the movement speaks and then ease off.
Distortion, saturation and waveshaping all add new harmonics above what the oscillator started with, and those extra harmonics are what give the bass its grit and its bite. Start gentle and push until it is as aggressive as the track wants. Different types have different characters, from soft clipping that warms the tone to hard clipping and bitcrushing that tear it up, so it is worth trying a few. The order matters too: distortion before the filter and distortion after it sound different, and many heavy basses use more than one stage, so experiment rather than assuming one right chain.
A reese source, two or more detuned sawtooths, already moves before you touch it, because the detuned oscillators beat against each other and shift the tone constantly. That is why it is such a common starting point for a wobble: there is built-in movement and grit for the filter and distortion to shape, so you get an aggressive result with less forcing.
Change the LFO rate as the bar goes on, so the wobble speeds up, slows down or switches pattern, and the bass feels played rather than looped. A single rate held for eight bars gets old fast; the same patch with the rate moving around stays interesting, and that variation is most of what separates a convincing wobble bass from a static one.
Many bass synths have a step LFO or a rate sequencer that lets you set a different note value per step, so you might run 1/8 notes for a bar, drop to a 1/4 for weight, then finish on a burst of 1/16s. If your synth cannot do that, you can automate the LFO rate by hand across the bar for the same effect. You can also move the bass between a few low notes and vary the cutoff, resonance and distortion over time so no two bars are quite the same. Some producers skip the LFO altogether and draw the filter movement in as automation for full, note-by-note control.
All that wobble, resonance and distortion happens in the mids and the highs. To keep the low end solid, run a separate sub layer, a plain sine on the root note, mono and left clean, playing underneath the whole time. The wobble lives on top where you can hear the movement, and the sub holds the bottom steady so the track never loses its weight when the filter closes down. Keeping that sub mono and untouched is the same idea that keeps any bass solid, covered in the how to make a bass sound guide.
Loop the bass for eight bars and listen. If the wobble is doing something different by the end than it was at the start, the rate changes are working. Then check it on a small speaker, a laptop or a phone: if you can still feel the low note under all the grit, the clean sub is doing its job. A wobble that moves and still holds its bottom is the one that carries a drop.
Everything above is the sound of the bass: the source, the LFO, the resonance, the distortion, the sub. That is the half you have just built. The other half is the actual part, which low notes play and in what rhythm, and it is a separate job you do not have to do by hand.
REHEAT is a writing tool. It generates the bass notes and the rhythm, so once you have a wobble patch you like you do not also have to labour over what it plays. Pick a groove and it writes a line that follows your chords, and you either drag that line out as MIDI or play it live, locked to your kick, straight through your wobble patch. The sound design stays yours; REHEAT just supplies the part to run through it. It runs as an Audio Unit, a VST3 and an AAX.
That split is the point of this page. The patch you build here is the sound; REHEAT supplies the notes to play through it, and the two stay separate, so you can change one without redoing the other.
Free to hear in the browser, no signup. Everything above still works by hand on any synth, which is rather the point of writing it down.
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