Designing a Morphing Dub Style NI Massive Pluck Synth

I’m really looking forward to the next couple collections that will be released before the end of the year, and you all get to benefit form my excitement! Here we are again with yet another sneak peek of a patch that will be included in one of those collections. Of course, this is not going to show you all of the bells and whistles built into the finished preset, but it does walk you through the steps of creating the core of this sound. And it leaves off at the perfect place for you to create your very own version of this NI Massive pluck synth. Spacey, deep, morphing, hypnotic, reverbalicious and perfect for those downtempo dub projects you’ve been working on. It only takes a couple minutes to make, so let’s get started!

To start things off, load a Woody wavetable into OSC1. Then load a Duck Organ into OSC2 and change the pitch value to 15.00. And load a Sonic wavetable into OSC3 and change the pitch value to 28.00. It may not sound like it right now, but this is the main core of our NI Massive pluck synth.

Now to shape the main Amp Envelope, as this dictates the large majority of how the NI Massive pluck synth will be delivered.

We also need to set up an LFO to control the modulation that will provide the morphing effect over time.

And although there have been no changes made to this envelope, we will use it in later steps as well.

Now we can assign both the LFO and the secondary envelope to a few parameters on our three main oscillators. The LFO is the key to this NI Massive pluck synth and will slowly modulate the Wt-position and Intensity knobs to change the overall sound over time.

Our sound is then routed through a Highpass 4 filter loaded into the Filter1 panel, and a Daft filter loaded into the Filter2 panel.

Some Hi-Metallic noise and Feedback are introduced to the NI Massive pluck synth at this point, which provide the rest of the main character of this sound.

On the Voicing tab, the total number of Unisono Voices is increased to five and spread out with both the Pitch Cutoff and Pan Position features. The synth is also set to run in Monophon mode with an Always trigger. This step adds some serious punch and width to our NI Massive pluck synth.

The last big step in this tutorial is to add some Synced Delay and Reverb to really extend this NI Massive pluck synth. Of course, you can expect to hear a much more impressive sound complete with a full array of Macro controls in the upcoming release that this sound is featured in!

Below is a quick audio sample of the NI Massive pluck synth in action alongside some drums and a nice sub bass synth.

Remember to shoot us a message before you leave if you have a tutorial request, or would like to share one of your own with the community.

Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
OhmLab