How to Make a "Mord Fustang-ish" Lead with NI Massive

Sometimes a sound comes along and used in such a way that it is deemed a ‘classic sound’ right there on the spot. Mord Fustang has a knack for it, and this video shows how to recreate on his his signature sounds.

Some artists just have the gift. They find a fairly simple sound and the perfect chords to show off the potential of that sound and combine it in such a way with the rest of their music that it just becomes iconic. It’s almost as if it cannot be helped. This is a perfect example of that, and who better than Steez to kick down the lesson to you. It’s a lead that can be made quickly, easily and without a great deal of sound design knowledge. Steez provides a walkthrough style of tutorial, which makes it easy to follow along and pause when you need to in order to make sure you have the settings duplicated in your own project.

This sound needs three oscillators to really work. The first oscillator runs a saw wave, the second a saw wave dropped an octave and the third a square wave also dropped one octave. This sound is then routed through a lowpass filter. The voicing unisono parameter is turned up to 4 for a bigger presense, while the pitch cutoff feature is enable to introduce a slight amount of phasing and the pan position featured is used to focus the sound a bit in the stereo field.

A classic tube amp is added for a slight distortion boost and chorus is added for a wider effect and a little motion. Both the EQ and the amp envelope are tweaked slightly to help shape the sound and delivery a little. And the Modulation OSC is used to introduce phasing to OSC3. This wraps up the sound design session and should give you a pretty good approximation of the popular lead synth that Mord Fustang is known for. You can easily make this sound your own by experimenting a bit with the parameters not touched yet in Massive, as well as swapping out different wavetables on the OSC tabs to begin with a different base sound altogether.

Cheers,
ΩhmLab