Making a Blade Style NI Massive Formant Saw

In less than two minutes you can be rocking this incredibly infectious and high energy Blade style NI Massive formant saw that immediately pushes your music forward. Very easy to recreate and tweak to make your own, it’s a synth that will remain in your patch library forever and find many great uses through the years. Whether you are producing techno, house, trance, pop, rock or something in between it’s going to be a welcome addition to your music.

This NI Massive formant saw starts out with the default Square-Saw I wavetable loaded into OSC1, with the Wt-position right in the middle. The pitch is then dropped two octaves and the oscillator is set to run in Formant mode. This gives us the basic sound already, but there are a few more tings to do to make it something special.

An envelope is set up and assigned to modulate the Intensity parameter of OSC1, providing a big boost in the drive department. A Macro control is also assigned to the Intensity knob to allow for some sweet modulation tweaking on-the-fly for both live performances and studio recordings. This gives the NI Massive formant saw the added character that the Blade style synth is so famous for.

The last two steps both happen on the FX tabs. First, a Reverb is added to give the sound some more space to develop in. And then a Dimension Expander is added to increase the perception of depth and width. That wraps up this NI Massive formant saw. Have some fun and experiment with swapping out wavetables, adding filters or tweaking parameters on the Voicing tab to discover some new versions of your own!

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Cheers,
OhmLab