Controlling Pitch and LFO Rates with Envelopes in NI Massive

MassiveSynth community member DubAlloy has been on fire lately with his NI Massive video tutorials, and this one is a great look at using envelopes to control pitch and LFO parameters.

Jumping right into this one, we start off with loading up a Modern Talking wavetable on OSC1 and set it to run in Bend-/+ mode. OSC2 is loaded with a Sine wave and dropped one octave. These are then run through a Daft filter on the Filter1 panel and after adjusting the cutoff amount, the filter mix slider is moved to the full upright position allowing the sound to only be affected by Filter1.

A Brauner Tube is added to beef up the sound a bit and add just a touch of distortion. A Dimension Expander is also added to bring some more space and depth to the sound. A quick stop at the Voicing tab to increase the number of voices and offset the Pan Position setting, makes this a much bigger sound.

The cutoff of Filter1 is modulated by an LFO, as well as an Envelope. This same envelope is then assigned to modulate the Rate parameter of the LFO also assigned to the cutoff of Filter1. This creates a lot of movement in the sound, and even comes across as an automated sequence!

Also shown in this video is how to use the same envelope again to modulate the Phase parameter of the Modulation OSC panel. The last example given is how the envelope can also be used to control the pitch and wavetable positions of the oscillators. A couple of quick tips tossed in at the end are using the envelope to modulate the pitch value of the Modulation OSC and the Dry/Wet knob of a Hardclipper to rough things up more.

Using the same envelope to automate the modulation of so many parameters at once in NI Massive is a great way to ensure consistency and help to gel the changes as they happen. If everything is changing and developing at the same time, and at the same rate, then it comes across as much more professional and precise. Do you have a similar technique you use with Massive? Would you like to share it with the rest of the community? Let us know by send a message our way. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
OhmLab