Make a Filthy Trap Lead in Under 5 Minutes Using Massive

In this tutorial, YouTube user TycoMusicChannel shows us how to quickly make a filthy trap lead in Massive in less than 5 minutes.

Trap leads are simple, yet effective. I can’t tell if the first person who started this wave of lazer pluck leads for trap is a sound design guru, or someone who has very limited sound design knowledge. Either way, I personally love how simple it is to create filthy trap style leads and when done correctly, they sound huge.

TycoMusicChannel brings us a very quick, easy and painless tutorial showing us how to get that now iconic lead sound that is in a lot of popular trap music. He uses the Scream filter for his tutorial, but you can get very interesting results using the Daft and Acid filter types. Also try adding just a little bit of bitcrusher to let the top end of the sound shine through.

I’ve found that when you try to use too many oscillators, filters and effects on a trap lead, you actually end up hurting the final sound. As TycoMusicChannel eluded to, the sub bass in trap music is usually the emphasis and if you have too much enharmonic content going on in your lead because of multiple oscillators, effects etc., the lead sound will eat up all of the space in the mix leaving no room for the sub to breathe. If you have to spend more than 5 minutes to get that filthy trap style lead then it’s probably because you are trying to do to much.