Making a Futuristic Lead Synth with Native Instruments Massive

It’s tough to put an exact name on this lead synth sound, as it has some characteristics from a few styles, so we’ll just call it Awesome  and continue onto the tutorial!

This sound is hot! And it’s also very easy to make using NI Massive. With a razor sharp edge and nice tonal quality it can be used successfully in a huge range of music genres and styles from rock, to pop, to funk, to house and your audience will love it every time. It kind of comes across as a space age soloing synth that you’d here in a movie soundtrack. Well, enough about all that. Let’s get into making this sound!

First, start with the default Square-Saw wavetable loaded into both OSC1 and OSC2, with the Wt-position knob in the full right position so it is a pure sawtooth wave. Now set OSC1 to run in Formant mode. Next, load a Lunacy wavetable into OSC3 and raise the pitch four octaves. An envelope is now set up with a long attack and assigned to modulate the Intensity knob of OSC1. And then an LFO is set up with a square wave and a very fast rate and assigned to modulate the Amp knob of the Noise panel, which is loaded with the Bright preset.

Now set up the filter panel to operate in serial mode, rather than the default parallel mode. Filter1 is left alone, while a Daft filter is loaded into Filter2. Another envelope is set up using the Vibrato preset and assigned to modulate the cutoff knob of the Daft filter. Next, the number of voices is increased to a total of five on the Voicing tab, and the synth is set to run in Monophon mode. This now allows you to use glide between notes, so the glide knob on the OSC tab needs to be adjusted to your liking.

Another envelope is set up with a long attack and is assigned to modulate the Vibrato Rate and Depth knobs to slowly introduce more movement to the sound as it develops. A Classic Tube Amp is added to FX1 to provide a bit of punch and a little distortion. At this point a Macro is set up, which is something you can also do for your sound if you are following along. It adds phasing to OSC2 via the Modulation OSC panel, as well as increases both the Dry/Wet and Drive parameters of the Classic Tube Amp. A Reverb is added to the FX2 tab to give the sound more space to move around in.

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Cheers,
OhmLab