Massive

Massives' user interface is pretty easy to work with. Dragging modulation sources onto targets is a breeze and changing the amount and polarity of the modulation is done in one mouse move. I like that a lot.

All rotary controllers are pretty big, but there are some very tiny fonts here and there that I find tiresome to read. Especially the drop down boxes for the waveforms, filter types and effect's are small.

A nice feature is that you can advance through the various waveforms by clicking an arrow next to the drop down, instead of going into the drop down box. It is annoying the same function is missing on other drop down boxes.

You can do a lot with just the oscillators and modulation in Massive. Therefore it is a pity you can't copy settings from one oscillator to another.

NI's marketing had given me the idea that Massive is almost modular because of a very flexible signal path. This is not true. All you can do is place two insert effects, a feedback chain and a bypass in different places in the signal chain, by clicking buttons in a bit cryptic signal flow diagram. That the insert effects do not offer the same type of effects as the main effects reduces the possibilities unnecessary. On the upside we can fade between parallel and serial configuration of the two filters and even modulate this. I have yet to program a useful sound using this feature, though.

I really like to program sounds for Massive. It's easy, creative and Massive sounds good. Or does it? I've been programming lots of sounds for Massive the last months, but I find that I almost never use them in my tracks. I somehow find it very hard to make the timbres I create in Massive work in a mix. I'm wondering if anybody is having the same issues?

Massive comes with a lot of presets and the kore-style library allows you to browse them by attribute which is very nice. Programming your own sounds with Massive is very easy and most fun. I find I use massive quite a lot, because of that.

Massive is very stable on my intel Imac running OS X 5 and 6. It is a CPU hog, as other KVR-members have pointed out, but If you are willing to sacrifice some detail in the sound you can put Massive in a more economic mode. This could come in handy when tracking, because you will want a short latency. While mixing down you could put Massive back in Ultra Quality mode.

Pro's:
- Very powerful and easy modulation system
- Versatile digital sound design tool

Con's
- Not as many effect types as i'd like.
- Audio signal routing complex, but semi-modular at best.
- The character of the oscillators makes this not the best virtual analogue emulation, IMO.Read Review