Skrillex Kyoto/Ruffneck NI Massive Tutorial

This is a nice NI Massive video tutorial from Stratos showing how to make the popular Skrillex Kyoto/Ruffneck synth in just a matter of minutes. 

This sound is requested all the time, so it’s about time we featured this video! It’s ideal for a wide range of dubstep and electro house style productions, and can easily be tweaked to fit into all sorts other genres. There is also a free patch download if you click through. Stratos does a good job of quickly moving through the steps and showing you how he set it up for easy manipulation for both live and studio performances. He has also made sure to make it accessible to everyone, regardless of experience or knowledge level with Massive or sound design by explaining why some of the decisions were made and how a lot of the things he touches affect the overall sound.

He uses FL Studio, but as always, you can get the same results with any DAW by simply following the same steps and applying them to your program of choice. He also uses some plugins, which he mentions, but are not completely necessary to achieve the sounds you want. It’s more about understanding the way a tool works and tweaking things until you get it right. Spending time to better understand how different effects really work allow you to create just about any sound you can imagine with the tools provided with your DAW.

Start with a square-saw wavetable dropped a couple of octaves running in formant mode on OSC1, then add a Chrome wavetable to OSC2 and set it to run in Bend+ mode, and lastly on OSC3 set up a Rough Math III wavetable with the pitch dropped a couple of octave. This then runs through a lowpass filter and a scream filter in parallel mode. A classic tube amp is added to boost the sound up and add a small amount of distortion. An EQ is added to help shape the sound some before moving on to the inserts. A parabolic shaper is added on both insert panels. The voicing is switched to monophonic mode to allow for gliding and the pan position feature is enable to widen the sound a bit.

The rest of the sound design and what you end up doing with it is really up to you! It is a very easy sound to tweak and change to fit your needs. You can play around with different distortion types, as well as adding some reverb, delay or dimension expansion to make the sound even bigger. As he mentions, there are options for dealing with the distortion once you get the sound out of NI Massive, you do not need any specific plugin although some do make finding some sounds easier and/or quicker.

Cheers,
ΩhmLab