Progressive Lead Synth in NI Massive and FL Studio

This is a great video showing you how to make a killer progressive house lead synth in just a few minutes, and it’s a sound you can tweak pretty easily to fit your music.

Square-Saw wavetables  and a modern talking wavetable combine to make a simple, almost modern 8-bit kind of sound that is the foundation of a catchy lead synth piece. This type of sound design is so much fun because it tests the limits of both simplicity and complexity rather nicely. When you find a basic melody that is sparse enough to really play around with delays, echos and reverbs together, it can transform into something truly awesome. Another great thing about this kind of sound is the fact that it can be done with just about any kind of wavetable, or combination of them.

This one starts out with a square wave on OSC1, a saw wave dropped one octave on OSC2 and a modern talking wavetable dropped two octaves on OSC3. It makes for a nice basic layered sound. This is all send through a lowpass filter, the cutoff of which is being modulated by an envelope to create some movement in its delivery.

With the base sound completed, now it’s time for some synced delay and reverb for a whole lot of space and depth. The sound starts bouncing around itself perfectly, and makes it sound like your melody is much more complex that it actually is. Some EQ adjustments are made to round out the sound and it’s done! It really is just that easy. And it’s wide on for further manipulation or reworking, from the wavetables to the filters to the unused inserts, feedback and noise panels. The possibilities are almost endless with a sound like this one.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this quick tutorial. If you have one of your own that you would like to share with people, we can help you get your ideas in front of thousands of people all around the world. Just shoot us a message and we’ll be happy to discuss it with you. Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
OhmLab