NI Massive Kangaroo Pluck Synth Tutorial

This helpful community member has been cranking out a huge amount of tutorials for NI Massive lately, so if you enjoy what he’s doing there is plenty more to check out on his YouTube channel and here on the MassiveSynth website. This quick lesson shares how to make a nice NI Massive Kangaroo pluck synth. And before you begin asking yourself what the heck that might be, it gets its name from the wavetable used to design the sound. We like to feature sounds here that use some of the more obscure or underutilized wavetables and features of this incredible synth, as there are so many new tutorials coming out each day that often times contain similar sounds and approaches to sound design.

This one begins by loading the Kangaroo wavetbale into OSC1 and increasing its pitch by two octaves. Next the Modulation OSC panel is used to introduce Ring Mod, Phasing and Positon modulation to the sound. All of these settings are as minimal as possible, so I suggest that you experiment with tweaking these parameters after you are done following along with this lesson to find your own version of this sound. It is an easy one to customize for your own projects, and this is a great place to start.

A Lowpass 4 pole filter is added to the Filter1 panel and the resonance is turned up to create a high frequency presence that dominates the character of this NI Massive kangaroo pluck synth. Next, the Decay level of the main amp envelope is lowered to create a pluck style curve. The total number of Unison voices is increased to four on the Voicing tab, and the Pan Position feature is used to spread the sound out slightly.

Some Reverb is loaded into the FX1 tab to provide more space for this NI Massive Kangaroo pluck synth to move around in. A Dimension Expander is added to the FX2 tab and used to widen the sound even more. And the EQ feature is qctivated and used to finish shaping the sound. The last step in this process is the set up a simple LFO and assign it to modulate the Wt-position of OSC1, which gives the synth a bouncing wobble signature.

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Cheers,
OhmLab