Native Instruments Massive X Synth - Sequel to Massive (Out Now!)

[EvilDragon]

Hey guys! So I did the follow up video and I thought before I made it live to my subscribers the experts could watch it and explain to me whats happening. Ive found that the filter compounds the aliasing and the LFOs in Oscillator modes are not band-limited at all! Square waves really break this thing.

Ok, when you modulate osc with lfo (square wave)...lol...thats some nasty aliasing, sounds very bad. I hope NI will release an update soon with some oversampling options. Back to Hive, Dune 3 and Serum until MX is fixed!

Can you directly hear the output of Hive's, Dune's and Serum's LFOs and use them at audio rate? If not, what makes you think their implementation is better?

I think part of the "problem" is that Massive X uses a more modular approach than other synths, e.g. you can connect the LFO directly to the audio sink, and this now exposes some details which you cannot even see in other synths.

Again correct.

[v1o]

So you might be ready to ask, "Why can't you make music with THIS synth?"

Well, I could. Absolutely. But, and this is where I finally stopped falling into this trap, when you take these synths with a sound that's bigger than life, and try to fit them into a track of music, well, you end up having to EQ the hell out of them so that they DO fit. Otherwise, they drown everything else out. All that low end on pads? You know that has to go, thinned out to almost nothing so that it doesn't drown out the vocals.

So I don't need another synth that sounds bigger than life to make music where I only end up destroying half the sound just to make it fit in the mix. I have plenty of them already. And my days of sitting and twiddling knobs and listening to the sound of a synth just for the sake of it are long gone.

Hmmm.. i don't understand this statement. You have to mix all tracks in a song what else? Sayin' the pads sound thin alone? Of course they do they are mixed but if you want to talk about why it's better not to use those "overdressed" factory presets in a track then that is a different story.

That's just my point. All these wonderful patches you hear in these demos? Almost none of them are suitable for actually making music. So you end up creating patches that you CAN use. Well, I've got enough synths to do that already so I don't need Massive X to do it.

Massive X is yet just another example of a synth that sounds great out there on its own but it absolutely useless within the context of making music where you can actually HEAR all the other instruments and vocals.

That's the trap I've stopped falling into.

To me that's a rather strange argument. What about those engineers that have to mix real recorded instruments? I don't think they would go: "Hey, you! Your electric guitar sounds too wide and takes up too much bandwidth on the spectrum. Could you please get yourself a guitar that sounds tinnier and also dial in some thin sound on your amp? I don't want to work that much..."

Again, you're missing the point. Yes, they have to EQ the hell out of all instruments, guitars, drums, horns, you name it. Nothing gets put into a track of music straight out of the box. We all understand that.

My point is, the appeal of Massive X is it's sound. The patches are all bigger than life. Sound as good as anything I have.

But NONE of them are usable as is. They all have to be tweaked. Some a ton. Suddenly, all that "big sound" is gone so that you can fit it in the mix.

If that's the case, I don't need Massive X's big sound just to make it small, just to fit it into a mix when I already have HUNDREDS OF SYNTHS THAT CAN DO THAT.

I'm no longer impressed, nor do I care about synths that sound great out of the box because I know that if I want to use them for a song, they won't sound ANYTHING like that when the track is done. That's the trap I'm not getting myself into anymore. I already have more than enough synths to make music. I don't need Massive X to make music.

I can't make it any clearer than that.

Might as well just stop buying synths your journey is now fully complete. There is no synth you will ever need.

[Functional]

Speaking of audio rate LFO's, I wonder how many people know a legitimate usecase for those? I actually legit use them for ringmod with the added benefit of you being able to pick your own waveform (I want that triangle, baby!)

It's actually really nice overall, because it's keytracked by default and you can keytrack it further by assigning one of the T-modulators to the rate and define keytracking further there. And, of course, it's poly which makes perfect

[BlitBit]

It doesnt matter, I for one use a lot of lfos in my sounds for my productions and I would never ever use a synth with this amount of aliasing in 2019, no matter is coming from osc or lfo modulating osc, etc etc. Its really not acceptable in this time.

Not sure if you are trolling but if you use LFOs to modulate at audio rate then I hope you use hardware. Otherwise please point me to a synth that does audio rate modulation without any artifacts.

[ghettosynth]

My assumption is that using the LFOs as audio rate oscillator is only meant as a fallback or compromise if you already use all the regular oscillators. So I would not even assume that NI "fixes" anything like is assumed in the video because the fix would be turning them into full blown audio rate oscillators which are more costly to implement.

Of course the big "cost" here is CPU. While I hardly notice this thing on my machine you only need to read this thread to see how many people are still using older machines. So, it's a reasonable compromise to limit the complexity of an LFO that has this additional ability to be used as an audio rate oscillator.

[sadowickproduction]

Cheers for the video, saved me some money

Demo it first. The video does not contain correct information.

STAAAAAP dude...

Dude, you're the one making videos about synth where you try to rationalize your dislike for it on the basis that it has aliasing filters.

So here's a task for you and I bet you're going to have a lot of fun with it: now go search me a synth that doesn't. I'm willing to bet that if I downloaded Serum demo and tried out the filter aliasing, I'd get quite similar results.

This is just you being an ass for no reason. I said yesterday that if you're going to do another one of these without doing any homework on it, you're gonna have a bad time.

We generally care less about filter aliasing because filters aren't used as modulation sources and their aliasing is nearly if not entirely inaudible in pretty much any normal usecase. It's rare, at least in my opinion. Of course feel free to disagree, but I don't think people on the average feed filters with oscs that have C10 or something above that as their fundamental. Do you?

For this very reason, nobody complains about filter aliasing (that is on par with what you're seeing there) that exists in pretty much every other softsynth. In fact, I measured with Omnisphere 2.6 aliasing peaks at -48db! https://gyazo.com/38b3a2f72cf1491aa79c59cc0b550fd3

Want to know what's the best part about this? The fact that your experiments couldn't be replicated in Omnisphere 2.6. Why? Because it doesn't actually play above F9. The wavetable engine doesn't go above that innately at least. So, Massive X is capable of going there in the first place.

I actually like the synth I just hold NI to a high standard. The LFOs were an aside because if I was making a synth with LFOs switchable to oscillators like in MX I would band-limit them in that mode, Im sure thats something they are going to fix soon.

[Kian Russell]

sadowick is 100% right.
massive x does alias, anyone trying to defend otherwise should hang their head in shame.

does it matter if it does alias? Yes of course, NI are throwing us early access at premium prices.
beware the shills that will defend NI's honor.

[EvilDragon]

Bandlimiting LFOs is a pretty stupid thing to do really.

My assumption is that using the LFOs as audio rate oscillator is only meant as a fallback or compromise if you already use all the regular oscillators. So I would not even assume that NI "fixes" anything like is assumed in the video because the fix would be turning them into full blown audio rate oscillators which are more costly to implement.

You are correct.

Thats it? No comment on the perceivable aliasing at the beginning?

Square waves are always notoriously hard/CPU expensive to antialias properly (since they're discontinuous by nature). If you want to spend that sort of CPU to get a clean square, use Serum (but even Serum can be pushed to aliasing - ANY digital synth can!). What is heard in MX with that square wave (osc, not LFO) is actually quite low aliasing levels compared to the CPU usage (and most other synths are usually much worse than this).


But tell me, please - in which sort of production would you use a 10th octave square wave audio-rate modulating something else? Honestly.


Also, the filters in MX are extremely low aliasing. What they add is odd harmonic saturation, this includes Asimov and Monark filters for sure. It's called character.

I actually like the synth I just hold NI to a high standard. The LFOs were an aside because if I was making a synth with LFOs switchable to oscillators like in MX I would band-limit them in that mode, Im sure thats something they are going to fix soon.

I would not expect that to happen, LFOs aren't supposed to be band-limited, no matter if they're running at audio rate or not. CPU saving measures.

[McLilith]

I think part of the "problem" is that Massive X uses a more modular approach than other synths, e.g. you can connect the LFO directly to the audio sink, and this now exposes some details which you cannot even see in other synths.

That sounds totally reasonable to me. Most synths don't allow you to listen their LFOs directly. I'd fully expect a lot of those LFOs to sound "less than pristine" when operated at higher frequencies.

[Functional]

I actually like the synth I just hold NI to a high standard. The LFOs were an aside because if I was making a synth with LFOs switchable to oscillators like in MX I would band-limit them in that mode, Im sure thats something they are going to fix soon.

...no, full stop. These LFO's are polyphonic and if you're going to add blamps or something, you'll effectively just make it that much more CPU hungry for an usecase that doesn't exist.

For what purpose do you want audio rate LFO's? You can't figure out too many. And out of those, how many actually care about aliasing? Nada. Zero. None.

[pixel85]

Oh f* I just finished track with 99% MX in use. Now I need to put it into a trash because MX have aliasing. Entire day wasted. Thank you guys! Now I can put this ugly MX with aliasing put into a trash! What a waste! In
2...
0...
1...
9...
Synth with aliasing! IT CAN'T BE!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's enough! I'm going back to ProTracker.

[Functional]

Oh f* I just finished track with 99% MX in use. Now I need to put it into a trash because MX have aliasing. Entire day wasted. Thank you guys! Now I can put this ugly MX with aliasing put into a trash! What a waste! In
2...
0...
1...
9...
Synth with aliasing! IT CAN'T BE!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's enough! I'm going back to ProTracker.

You know what they say. Aliasing is a slow and insidious killer.

[BlitBit]

If I had to summarize certain posts in this thread it would be one word: "Entitlement".

I guess if Massive X had implemented all the features that people are demanding in this thread they would be complaining about high CPU loads now.

[chk071]

Oh f* I just finished track with 99% MX in use. Now I need to put it into a trash because MX have aliasing. Entire day wasted. Thank you guys! Now I can put this ugly MX with aliasing put into a trash! What a waste! In
2...
0...
1...
9...
Synth with aliasing! IT CAN'T BE!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's enough! I'm going back to ProTracker.

Just rename ("alias") the track. Problem solved.

[BlitBit]

But tell me, please - in which sort of production would you use a 10th octave square wave audio-rate modulating something else? Honestly.

"Symphonies for Bats - An Evening in the Cave"