Creating a Proper NI Massive Deep House Bass Synth

As I take on the task of creating tutorials around some of the questions and requests posted in our new forums, it will take some time to get through them and not all will be able to be dealt with in tutorials like this. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we figure out the best way to handle them all and hope that these bonus tutorials help many of you, above and beyond the person who posted the original questions. That said, this particular lesson in how to recreate a bass synth heard in the DJ T. Feat. James Teej song Sense (Tale Of Us Remix) is being produced in response to a post from user SleepWalkNick. He asked if we could help him design a proper NI Massve deep house bass synth of this kind.

This sound starts out with a default Square-Saw I wavetable loaded into OSC1 with the pitch dropped just over two octave. Next a Sine wave is loaded into OSC2, which is set to run in Bend+ mode and with the pitch dropped just shy of two octaves. Finally, another Sine wave is loaded into OSC3, which is also set to run in Bend+ mode and has a pitch value of -6.97. These slight deviations in pitch will help widen the sound, as well as generate a small amount of phasing and interest.

Before going any further, the Main Amp Envelope needs to be tweaked slightly to help avoid unwanted clicking and better shape the delivery of our NI Massive deep house bass. While we are here, we also need to set up a secondary envelope which will be used to modulate a filter in the next step.

The three main oscillators are routed directly to the Filter1 panel where an Acid filter has been loaded. Assigning the secondary envelope we just set up to modulate the Cutoff parameter of the Acid filter will shape how the sound is delivered. This is one of the biggest factors in how this NI Massive deep house bass will be perceived.

Now the Voicing tab is set up. Here the synth is set to run in Monophon mode and the total number of Unisono Voices is increased to three. The Pitch Cutoff feature is sued to bring just a touch more subtle phasing to our NI Massive deep house bass. And the Pan Position feature is used to widen it even further.

The last big step in the process of making this NI Massive deep house bass is to set up the FX and EQ tabs. A Dimension Expander is used to make this synth a bit bigger, while the Synced Delay unit is used to extend the sound. The EQ finishes shaping the synth.

Below is a short audio sample of this NI Massive deep house bass in action. Of course, when you go to use this sound in a project a small amount of processing will needed to perfect the delivery and development of the synth. No processing of any kind has been used outside of Massive in this recording.

Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
OhmLab