Making the Datsik Firepower Alien Lead Synth in NI Massive

Datsik has a ton of great sounds that people are very excited to reproduce for their own projects, and this is one that is easily used in a wide range of music, and it’s fun to make.

Once you have a basic understanding of how Native Instruments Massive synth works, then tweaking a sound like this one to make it fit your projects perfectly is an easy thing to do. YouTube user NewNormandieMCServer walks us through each of the steps he follows to produce his version of this popular sound. It moves at a nice pace, which most folks can follow easily and he takes the time to explain much if the reasoning behind the programming as he works. Nothing in this video is very technical or polished, but the results are the same – you end up with a cool sound. You may have good success with adding a touch of noise and feedback to make it sound a little more organic with your own music.

This sound starts off with all three of the main oscillators. OSC1 is running a square-saw wavetable, OSC2 is running a sine-square wavetable and OSC3 is running a sine-triangle wavetable. An LFO is assigned to modulate all three oscillators’ pitch equally to generate the desired movement. Then the main amp envelope is gently tweaked to better shape the delivery of sound.

He then sets it up as a polysonic synth with a unisono value of three on the Voicing tab. He also activates the wavetable position feature on this panel and sets the slider to the extreme right before moving on. Some small reverb is added to expand the sound just a bit. And a bit crusher is inserted to rough up the waveform some and give it a more digital character.