Dubstep with NI Massive Part 4: The Riser

The riser is an important element in most modern dubstep songs. It adds tension, builds interest and engages the audience in a way that generates expectations of something great happening in the very near future. Today’s lesson from Jonny shares how you can use NI Massive to design your own killer risers that will be affective and professional sounding in a finished mix. As with most things in the dubstep production community, once something has been done the next person to attempt it needs to either do it differently or better. That’s just the way the one-ups-manship works in this part of the music world. So this riser is quite unique and will hopefully inspire some new ideas of your own after you have finished following along with the tutorial.

It starts out with a Sawtooth loaded into OSC1 with the pitch dropped one octave and set to run in Formant mode. OSC2 is set up identically to OSC1, but the pitch has been dropped two octaves rather than just one. This sound is then sent through both a Comb filter loaded into the Filter1 panel and a Highpass4 filter loaded into the Filter2 panel. The total number of unison voices is increased to two in the Voicing tab and set to run as in monophonic mode. Here, the Pan Position is also used to spread this sound out some.

Moving now to the OSC tab, the Glide is removed but the ability to pitch bend is added. A Dimension Expander effect is loaded into FX1 to create a wider and deeper sound and a Rever unit is loaded into FX2, which provides more space for the synth to develop and move around in. A Modulation envelope is set up and assigned to control the Intensity parameter of both OSC1 and OSC2, as well as the Pitch parameter of Filter1 and the Cutoff parameter fo Filter2. Then an LFO is set up and assigned to control the Intensity parameter of both OSC1 and OSC2. And a Performer is then set up and assigned to modulate the Pitch knob of Filter1 and the Cutoff knob of Filter2. For added effect, this Performer is also assigned to control the Filter Mix slider, as well as the Mix and Size of the Reverb unit. You can also experiment with modulating the speed at which this all develops, which can lead to some fantastic results!

Cheers,
OhmLab