Making a Gritty Laser Downlifter with Native Instruments Massive

This quick NI Massive tutorial will show you how to use an LFO, a Performer and an Envelope to create a very cool downlifter FX that can handle being used in some pretty big transitions.

This sound has Transformers™ written all over it. It has a ton of unique and interesting sounds happening throughout the delivery that can easily be exposed and manipulated if you want to customize this FX for your own use. And it’s very simple to reverse this effect and have it become an uplifter instead, depending upon your needs. It does have some processing done in Ohmicide, which is a multi-channel distortion plugin, but you can accomplish something similar with other distortion and saturation tools. You may also find success in using just a touch of chorus or phasing to generate even more pitch variations to exploit.

It starts out with a Lunacy wavetable, running in Formant mode and a dropped Pitch value of -36.75. This is then run through a Daft filter and a small amount of feedback is introduced. A Parabolic Shaper is added to help accentuate some of the distorted and phased sounds that will occur.

Then an LFO is set up and assigned to modulate the Wt-position parameter of the Lunacy oscillator. A Performer is then set up in a very minimal fashion and assigned to modulate the Amp of that same oscillator, basically lowering the volume completely once every bar. Now a Classic Tube Amp is added to give it some extra punch and a touch of distortion, while a Dimension Expander is used to give it a lot more space to work in.

The last major step in the process is setting up an envelope with a long attack to modulate the pitch value of Lunacy oscillator to provide the downlifter effect. You may also want to tweak the EQ settings a bit to your liking before wrapping things up inside of Massive. The rest of this sound is finished by processing with distortion of some kind to really rough it up.

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Cheers,
OhmLab