Pro Tips for Making NI Massive Formant Bass Synths

We welcome back Nick as he walks through the basic steps of making the two most common types of NI Massive formant bass synths used in music grenres like electro house and dubstep. He also shares some great tips on how to tweak and use them in various different ways. This is a very straightforward and fast-paced tutorial, so you may want to pause the video after each step is discussed so you can recreate it yourself before moving on to the next part. The segments may be short and sweet, but the content is valuable and you should not miss any of it!

First, he explains the two main approaches to designing NI Massive formant bass synths. The most basic is comprised of two sawtooth waves loaded into OSC1 and OSC2. One of the oscillators is set to run in Formant mode, while the other remains in Spectrum mode. The second most common way to make this type of instrument is to again load a sawtooth wave into both OSC1 and OSC2, but this time rather than setting one of them to run in formant mode, you simply increase the pitch up four octaves and then introduce some Ring Modulation to it via the Modulation OSC panel. Of course, there are many more ways to approach this kind of sound, but these are just the two most basic and fastest methods.

Some of the tips shared in this lesson to change up these NI Massive formant bass synths are just a s simple as the sound design itself. First, try swapping out some wavetables fro different ones, or adding a third. You may also want to experiment with change some of the pitch values of your oscillators. Adding a touch of Vibrato can also provide some great results. Tweaking the Intensity parameter of an oscillator running in Formant mode is another way you can customize your sound. You can try experimenting with different filters, effects and various forms of modulation to take these simple NI Massive formant bass synths even further!

Cheers,
OhmLab