by Guthey » 04 Apr 2014 17:32
The sub should be modulated less than the way the growl is, too fast a change will cause a feeling of speed up tempo causing the song to not flow as well as it should. Just make the sub constant, make a melody out of it, or just have it follow the entire verse's main arp piano melody, but keep the notes held, do not be frequent with them as it begins to sound extremely strange. Say you have a arp in the key of C and then it transfers to, say A minor, simply let the sub follow the main key. I would take out the growl completely as it does not sound like it fits in this at all.
As for the distortion, I have to say it's probably just the way the bass was created. If you are using FM then check one of the operators to see if one has many striations in its frequency and simply change that up a bit. Another reason is that it might be taking on the distortion or static of another sound. To make this simple, if you have white noise going on or some high frequencies going on, then I would suggest you lower them. They cause phase cancellation which means that two opposite frequencies cross each other and cause a cancellation. Say we get a sine wave and mix it with a cosine wave, since they are opposite waves, they cancel each other out, relate that to sound and you get the same thing. What might have happened is that the white noise's high frequency was greater than that of the growl's, causing the white noise's frequency to not only cancel out the bass's, but that it took the place of the bass's high frequency, hence it creates that sort of high pitched distorted sound. Lastly, the bass just might be too loud and it's clipping itself, which also causes the distortion to occur.
Hope some of this helps, if not, then I guess it is the simple will of the gods.