Making an A-Trak style Growl Bass in NI Massive

This is a catchy sound and a wicked addition to any modern popular music production. With more and more electro and dubstep elements being used in a wide range of music styles, learning how to make this growl bass in NI Massive will add one more useful sound to your arsenal.

Using an LFO or a Performer to automate the modulation and movement of e growl bass in NI Massive is fairly standard these days, now that more producers and musicians are beginning to master this synth. But the Stepper is still rather underutilized in automating wobbles and simple sequences that can give a bass it’s true character. This approach will he;p enhance the harsh and rough edges of this kind of sound, while also providing an extra rhythmic element to your music productions. Once you have finished following along with this video, experiment with using different wavetables and using some insert effects and filters to take this sound to another level.

Making this growl bass in NI Massive begins with loading the default Square-Saw wavetable into OSC1, setting it to run in Bend+ mode and dropping the pitch by -40.00 semitones. This synth will be kept especially simple, which makes it a perfect candidate for further manipulation later on to create your own versions for your productions.

A Stepper is set up and assigned to modulate the pitch of OSC1. The pattern programmed in this video is merely an example and should be tweaked until you really like the way it works with your music. And don’t be afraid to play around with the Amp Mod and Glide Mod features on the Stepper. These can often times lead to some very cool results!

The last steps in making this simple growl bass in NI Massive is to activate the EQ and using it to boost the low end of the sound drastically, while also giving a boost to the high end frequencies and the mid-low range as well. And a quick stop at the Voicing tab to increase the total number of voices to 2 two. This now allows you to use the Pan Postion feature to spread the voices across the stereo field for a wider sound, and the Pitch Cutoff to introduce a small amount of phasing.

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Cheers,
OhmLab