How to Make a Retro Style NI Massive House Organ

This is such an iconic sound and we have featured some that are similar on the blog in the past, so we were happy to find this one to share with you all too. Since there is no spoken instruction in this video, you may want to pause it frequently to make sure you are not missing anything while following along. This particular NI Massive house organ only takes a couple of minutes to make, so you should have plenty of time to experiment with some of the parameters to really make this one your own.

It starts out with a simpel MIDI pattern for you to program into the piano roll of your DAW. Although not entirely necessary, it is always nice to hear the sound in context while it is being made. Especially a simple sound such as this NI Massive house organ, which can involve some subtle finessing to make it fit your project exactly as you want it to.

Setting up the Noise oscillator prior to the main oscillators (as seen in this tutorial) is something a lot of people prefer to do because they are able to hear it on its own with the influence of any other sound. Then a sub bass presence is added with loading a Sine wave into OSC1 with the pitch dropped one octave. So already you have a sound that has noise and low end presence before the elements typically thought of as most important are introduced.

Now a Fledners III wavetable is loaded into OSC2 with the pitch dropped one octave. This is followed by loading a Flender III wavetable into OSC3. The variations of pitch in this sound make it deep and interesting. An envelope is set up and assigned to modulate the Intensity parameter of OSC3 to help shape the delivery and development of this NI Massive house organ.

Our NI Massive house organ is then run through a Lowpass 4 filter. Another envelope is set up and assigned to modulat ethe Cutoff parameter of the Lowpass filter. This is also a good time to take a moment to tweak the curve of the Main Amp Envelope, which greatly affects how the sound is shaped. It should also be mentioned at this point that the video shows all three main oscillators sending their audio signal in equal amounts to both Filter 1 and Filter2. Since Filter 2 is not used in this particular example, you may want to set all of them to rout directly to just Filter 1.

A Synced Delay is added to help spread out and extend this NI Massive house organ. A Reverb effect is also used to give the sound more room to move around in. You can also use a Dimension Expander to achieve slightly different results. Something to experiment with in your own version of this instrument.

Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
OhmLab