Creating a Huge NI Massive Supersaw Flex Synth

Although the first thing you make think of when hearing this type of instrument is Trance music, a synth such as this can also be heard in house, electro, techno and various other genres now. It has crossed over into some unexpected new territory in recent years, mostly because of the special kind of flexibility it brings to the music. It’s easy to manipulate and the core sound is basic enough that it matches up well with many other sounds. The key to a huge sounding NI Massive supersaw like this is a combination of voicing and pitch settings. And it is an easy sound to process, as it works well with all sorts of effects too. Let’s see how it’s made.

To start this NI Massive supersaw off, the total number of Unison Voices is increased to 8 on the Voicing tab. Then the Pan Position feature is turned on and used to widen the sound. Next, the Pitch Cutoff feature is used to spread out the voices and introduce some natural phasing. Once this is done we can move on to setting up the main oscillators. A default Square-Saw I wavetable is loaded into all three main oscillators. The pitch is varied across these oscillators as follows; OSC1 is set to 12.05, OSC2 is set to -0.04 and OSC3 is set to -11.96. This creates a very big sound already and you should be able to recognize the iconic character that is building.

Next, some Bright Noise is introduced via the Noise oscillator. All the main oscillators and the noise oscillator are all routed directly into the Filter1 panel, where a Daft filter has been loaded. A Modulation Envelope is set up and assigned to control to Cutoff parameter fo this filter. Now a Hipass/Lowpass Filter is added as an insert effect, which can be used later to modulate the sound easily through automation or MIDI mapping. A chorus unit is loaded into the FX1 tab, which gives our sound more depth and movement. And a Dimension Expander is loaded into the FX2 tab, which gives this NI Massive supersaw some more room to move around in.And the EQ is used to finish shaping the sound. That wraps up the synth programming side of things. The rest of the tutorial shares how you can control the transitions between pluck and pad and how to process the sound to work in different types of music.

Cheers,
OhmLab