Getting Bigger Bass Synths with the NI Massive Bypass Feature

So you design a super phat bass synth and make sure to add in that needed sub bass. Great. But what about the filters and effects you also have in there? This helpful tutorial will share a quick tip on how you can achieve bigger bass synths by using the NI Massive Bypass feature!

This one may seem like common sense to some of the more experienced, or professionally trained, community members out there. But I see it almost daily in the training that I do with people. They make a killer sounding bass synth, only to have some of that much desired sub bass stripped away before it ever leaves the synth itself. This happens naturally as the sound passes from the oscillator panels to the filters, into the effects, etc. This is because Massive is a subtractive synthesizer, but there is a simple workaround build in for just this kind of thing and it’s all made possible by the often overlooked NI Massive Bypass panel. Let’s see how it’s done.

So, as you can see from the image below I have set up a simple bass synth to use for this example. As this is not necessarily a sound design tutorial, but more of a lesson in audio routing, we will skip over the sound itself and focus our attention and efforts on the subject at hand. How to make bigger bass synths by utilizing the NI Massive Bypass feature.

First you need to know that the sub bass was set up on the OSC1 panel, shown in the image below.

Taking a close look at the Routing tab, you can see that OSC1 has been set up to utilize the NI Massive Bypass feature. This means that when we use it, the sound being generated by OSC1 is routed directly to the EQ unit. It skips over the filters, insert effects and any FX used in the rest of the synth. This is done by moving the NI Massive Bypass slide, show in the second image below, to the fully upright position. It provides us with a nice untouched sub bass that will really fill out and support the rest of this sound. This same technique can be used in countless other ways, but this is perhaps the most common way you will find yourself using it at first, especially if you are producing modern bass music.

Below is a small audio sample of this sound in action. You need to use either speaker or headphones that provide some sub bass support for you to hear it. Keep in mind there has been no kind of processing of any kind used, not even EQ or compression outside of Massive.