I’m Michael Lichtenstein,
a technophile drawn to storytelling, visual design, and animation.
My background spans visual effects and web design. Today I work in digital accessibility and web governance, and build tools, games, and experiments here at Colorbass.
I’m usually down for disc golf, kayaking, or badminton.
My SoundCloud
Listen on SoundCloudProjects
Chrome extensions
Games
A few things I’ve made along the way.
What is color bass?
Color bass gives dubstep’s heavy, syncopated rhythms a harmonic voice: the bass itself carries chords and pitched overtones. It often combines hard-hitting drums with glassy, metallic, liquid, or vocal-like textures.
How it’s made
Vocoding can combine a bass sound’s rhythmic shape with a synth chord’s harmonics. Convolution with chord-based impulses adds tuned resonances, while pitch-mapping tools such as Pitchmap reshape complex sounds around a scale or chord. The production challenge is keeping those dense upper harmonics clear while the sub-bass and drums retain their impact.
Origins & artists
Chime coined “colour bass” around 2016 and helped develop the scene through Rushdown . Au5, Xilent, and Flux Pavilion are early touchstones; Virtual Riot is another major name associated with the sound. The scene also includes Sharks, Skybreak, Ace Aura, and Paper Skies.
Technique references: Chime’s color bass methods , Au5’s convolution tutorial , and Nasko on Chroma .
Tools for color bass
A focused selection for pitch mapping, melodic resonance and bass/chord morphing—the processing behind color bass’s harmonic textures.
Free
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EB-Resonator
Melodic resonance · plugdata patch
Adds melodic resonance to bass audio. Free / pay what you want; runs inside the free plugdata host, available as a VST3, AU, CLAP or LV2 plugin.
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Polarity-RES
Resonator bank
Tune up to 32 resonant filters to notes or harmonics and follow MIDI. Use the bank to impose a pitched harmonic shape on bass audio. Native plugin; no patch host required.
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EB-Morph
Audio morphing · plugdata patch
Blend a rhythmic bass with a sustained chord using cepstral morphing. Free / pay what you want; requires plugdata and sidechain routing for the second sound.
Paid
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Pitchmap::Colors
Pitch mapping
Designed with Au5 for harmonic sound design. Maps atonal basses and other audio to a key or scale, adding resonant, pitched texture.
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Chroma
Scale mapping
Developed with Nasko. Maps polyphonic audio to a scale; the Color control adds resonant tails, with spectral controls for transients and decay.
More paid tools 3
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Pitchmap
Polyphonic pitch mapping
Remaps pitches inside complex audio to a scale or MIDI notes. More detailed note mapping than Colors; useful for imposing harmony on noisy bass material.
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Rezonator
Chord resonance
Six tunable resonators turn incoming audio into chord textures. Switch between chord states or use MIDI to move the harmony over a rhythmic bass.
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MMorph
Spectral morphing
Combine a bass’s rhythmic character with a chord’s spectral shape using main and sidechain inputs. A two-source morphing route to harmonic bass textures; listed in Chime’s setup.
Why do I own colorbass.com?
I don't know. It seemed like a good idea at the time.