Design Your Own Custom Vinyl Crackle FX in NI Massive

So you make a killer beat for a new project, but it sounds a bit too clean? No problem! This cool tutorial will show you how to make your own vinyl crackle FX in NI Massive!

There are plenty of vinyl crackle samples, and even plugins, nowadays to help in most situations, but what if you don’t have access to those? Or perhaps you just want something a little different than what everyone else is using? This lesson will share one way you can create your own vinyl crackle FX in NI Massive in no time at all! And this is such a simple sound to make your own or to quickly customize for your own specific needs. It is also tuned, so you can choose the rate and pitch at which the crackle plays back, making it incredibly easy to work with. If you prefer to create a non-dynamic vinyl crackle FX in NI Massive, all you need to do is adjust the KeyTracking parameters accordingly to keep it from changing pitch or oscillation rate when different notes are played. This will all start to make more sense as we progress through the tutorial. So let’s get started!

Start by loading a Pulse-Saw PWM wavetable into OSC1 and OSC2, with the Pitch parameter dropped all the way down to -64.00. Next load a Dirty PWM wavetable into OSC3 and dropp the Pitch value down to -37.00. This will will be the main core of our vinyl crackle FX in NI Massive.

This sound is then routed through both a HighPass4 filter, loaded into the Filter1 panel. And then through a Daft filter, loaded into the Filter2 panel. As you can see in the image below, the filters have been set up to run in Serial mode, rather than the default Parallel mode, and the output crossfade slider has been set to only allow a signal from Filter2 through.

The next step in designing the vinyl crackle FX in NI Massive is to set up the Noise Oscillator, running an AC Power preset, and some gentle Feedback (routing shown later).

Now a Sample & Hold Insert Effect unit is added, as well as a Frequency Shifter insert effect.

This is a good time to set up the FX and EQ tabs. First, a Dimension Expander is added. Then, a Reverb unit. Lastly, the EQ is enable and used to cut out all low end and boost all the high end presence. This step is what really makes this vinyl crackle FX in NI Massive work.

Probably the most important factor in a sound like this one (and why so many vinyl crackle plugins out there suck) is randomization. But rather than use the randomization features in NI Massisve to accomplish this, we can actually do much better. If we set up a few LFOs to modulate several of the parameters throughout this synth we will be able to create something truly unique, and therefore it will come across as much more believable. So below are the setting for three different LFOs, each of which will be applied in the next few steps of this lesson in designing our vinyl crackle FX in NI Massive.

We now need to revisit the main oscillator panels and set up the filter routing and assign some LFOs to manage some parameters for us.

And now we do the same with the Filter panel.

The Modulation OSC panel is turned on and the Ring Mod, Phaser and Filter FM features are put to use.

Some modulation assignments are made on the Noise panel.

Both the Dimension Expander and Reverb also get some modulation added.

So does the Pan parameter on the Main Amp panel.

The last big step in the process of making this vinyl crackle FX in NI Massive is to set up the Voicing tab. Here the total number of Unison Voices is increased to five and they are spread out via the Pitch Cutoff, Wavetable Position and Pan Position features.

Below is a quick audio sample of our sound applied to some simple drums. First the drums with no crackle, then with a crackle. As you can hear it adds that subtle atmospheric character that adds a certain something that breaths life (and history) into it. Keep in mind that no processing or mixing of any kind has been applied to the sounds in this example.