How to Achieve a Dusty and Atmospheric Effect in NI Massive Deep House Sounds

Ambient and chill music genres use air, noise and atmosphere so well that they are almost considered signature traits. This quick lesson in achieving that dusty character in NI Massive deep house synths will help you get there.

The deeper and more atmospheric types of electronic music have long been viewed as being centered around the smallest of details. In a way this is true because there is so much space for the sounds to breath in that when any sort of change or texture is brought to the surface, it is heard immediately. And this raises a bit of a challenge for artists and producers in this area of music because it demands balance and subtle management of various elements really only ever seen by the people making the magic happen. This quick lesson will kick down some helpful tips and insights, while also showing you how to make a nice chorded NI Massive deep house lead synth in the process.

This NI Massive deep house synth patch starts out with a Colors wavetable loaded into both OSC1 and OSC2. OSC1 has a pitch value of 12.02 and OSC has a pitch value of 18.97. And a Melomantic wavetable is loaded into OSC3, with a pitch value of -12.97. The variations in pitch will generate a gentle phasing effect to provide subtle movement in our sound over time.

Now, right away I know that I want to have this NI Massive deep house synth ease in when it is first played, but I imagine it kind of gliding into notes after that. So we need to set up a modulation envelope. This will be used to control several parameters at once to help ensure a nice even and consistent delivery each time the sound is triggered afresh.

A Daft filter is loaded into Filter1 and a Lowpass4 filter is loaded into Filter2. YOu can see in the image below that the modulation envelope we just set up is assigned to control both Cutoff knobs of these filters. This allows our NI Massive deep house synth to ease in to action.

To have an NI Massive deep house synth that gently comes into your mix at first but then glides between sustained notes after that, we need to set this synth to run in Monorotate mode and set the trigger to Legato. If you prefer to have the synth re-trigger each time a note is played and ease in to action with the longer attack parameter, simply switch the trigger type to Always. While we’re on this page the total number of unison voices is also increased to three, which are them spread out via the Pitch Cutoff (provides gentle phasing), Wavetable Position (affect position of wave in current wavetable) and Pan Position (provides width) features. You can adjust the amount of Glide on the OSC tab.

The Dimension Expander and Reverb units are used to provide more space for this NI Massive deep house synth to move around in, while the EQ unit helps further shape the sound.

The Tape Noise is used to impart a dusty character to the sound and the modulation envelope set up earlier is assigned to the Amp knob to bring it in at the same rate as the sound is revealed by the filters. The Feedback unit provides more thickness and presence in our NI Massive deep house synth.

The Bitcrusher insert effect helps provide more air and atmosphere to our sound, while the HP LP Filter shave a bit off the top and bottom of the sound to make it more rounded.

Below is a short audio sample of this sound in action. No processing has been applied outside of NI Massive.