Part 3 – Intro to SUBTRACTIVE Synthesis

Here’s the third and final part of Jonno Incledon’s guide to Subtractive synthesis:

Subtractive Synthesis with Massive Part 3: Massive Three Rising Revengeance

Macros

Macros, yes those weird little yellow knobs that didn’t do anything. But High Rankin says that there a crucial part of Massive!

We’ll also run over voicing and how it can turn your sound from flat into phat. Now though, we’ll wrangle those dastardly little sods and pave our way to Stereo!

Now, in part 2 we made a weird little pitch modulated rise, but it sounded flat and uninteresting.

How do we fix that? We add more of course, by using Massive’s voicing function.

Voicing in Massive adds extra voices of the same sound whenever you play a note. So, when we play a note now, instead of having a single flat sound play we have 12 instead. If you wanna go a little extra, turn on the pitch cutoff and give it a little slide to the right. Changing the pitch cutoff will alter the other voices pitch leading to some crazy effects.

Now that everything sounds a little fuller, we can get onto the macros. Macro controls can be assigned to various functions like vibrato, legato, soprano, whatever and can also be assigned to a MIDI controller by right clicking and selecting MIDI learn then twisting whatever knob you want to assign it to.

Start off the click-dragging the little set of arrows on the vibrato knobs and dropping it into the oscillators wave table position.

Now any changes to the Macro will affect the wave table position the track.

Have a little fiddle, and see how it sounds!