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

[ghettosynth]

As much as I love Massive X, I really don't know why anyone would buy any NI product that's in the current version of Komplete standard.

[ghettosynth]

And is there a law somewhere that a "flagship synthesizer" should have animated ADSR graphs?

Yes. My law. Serum showed how it can be done.

Cmon now, Serum was hardly the first synth to do this. The original Massive let's you grab the graph and move it. Absynth has "dots" to adjust the shape. I'm not even convinced that these are the first I just don't have much installed that's older.

[perpetual3]

Downloaded the demo, but can find the presets? Any ideas?

[chk071]

Did you download and install the factory library stuff as well? https://www.native-instruments.com/file ... ibrary.iso

Assuming you meant "can't", and not "can", as you wrote, hehe.

[perpetual3]

Did you download and install the factory library stuff as well? https://www.native-instruments.com/file ... ibrary.iso

Assuming you meant "can't", and not "can", as you wrote, hehe.

Thank you!

[Maeldron]

After having done more tests, I don’t think so. Rather, it seems like MX is processing at a fixed samplerate independent of the host’s rate.
What I did is render MXs output at 192kHz (by setting project samplerate in REAPER).
While the same test unsurprisingly results in greatly reduced aliasing with Serum (and other synths), with MX it does NOT. Thus, it looks like there is currently no way of improving PM quality in MX...

At least, for one thing, I’m grateful for Massive X. Today, I learned how to check the aliasing, at least on a basic level.

I recorded a video about it. Details are in the description.



To me, it seems that Serum’s 2x does much more than oversampling. In Draft mode, it has a lot of aliasing on the sine wave even in 192kHz, but in 2x mode, it has no aliasing on it at 44.1kHz.

It might be a better terminology to call it “HQ”, as u-he does, because it’s closer to the truth than “2x”.

I guess there are many and maybe more exciting ways to measure aliasing than comparing sine waves. It’s my first try ever, and it’s already helpful. Also, I was not sure how to make a sine wave in Diva.

As far as I see, Zebra, Bazille, Serum, Omnishphere, and Massive can make a sine wave.

Ana 2 and Massive X can’t.

About Ana 2 and Diva, I’m not sure, because I don’t know them well enough. As for Massive X, I doubt that it was my fault.

By the way, the synths sound quite different on different sample rates. As for Diva, the higher the better.

I’m working on my first track ever, and I started it on 176.4kHz for the reason above. It was too much suffering. I switched to 88.2kHz. But I am not sure it sounds the same. When I tested it, about a year ago, the obvious difference was between 44.1kHz and the rest.

(I have to check Bazille again because I noticed something strange in the video).

The bright side of the story that my biggest problem about my first track is solved. It was that I have so many synths that I get lost between them, and I didn’t learn any of them well enough yet. From now, I will ignore everything that can’t even make a sine wave. What could be easier than that?

[Functional]

Another fun thing: somehow Massive X is actually capable of doing... Boards of Canada sounds?

If anyone is interested here I could try and make it into an usable preset and upload it somewhere. This thing seriously sounds like Boards of Canada. I know that this claim is extremely dubious because often "BoC"-presets are just some detuned presets that barely sound like BoC but this is honestly as close as I could imagine a softsynth ever getting to them

Curious about what is specific to Massive X that would make it sound closer to BoC than other synths?

If you have MX, try this:

Load in Moto Saw. Put osc mode into Jitter, J1 & P.Switch. Jitter all the way to max. Run it through the comb filter to tame it down. Fiddle with the waveform. And there you have your answer: the robust osc modes (Jitter & Random in particular!) in combination with the robust comb filter can do it.

What these do is cause instability in your osc one way or another. If you'd feed directly the oscs into output, they would sound aaaaawful. Comb filter will pick them up though along with just the right amount of instability. Here's an example that doesn't have any outboard effects, in fact nothing even internally aside from low pass & high pass filters in an utility insert (i.e. no reverb or anything at all): https://picosong.com/wNhGe/

[Functional]

From now, I will ignore everything that can’t even make a sine wave. What could be easier than that?

You'd be surprised. For one, if you wanted a pure & clean sine wave, maybe you should use the "filter" knob in the osc section to make it, because that's how you make clean sine waves. The wavetable sinewaves are not clean, by design.

Thing is: almost nobody uses clean sinewaves to begin with.

[chk071]

Edit: nevermind

[jsp1979]

Should we require a license in order to use an oscilloscope?

[Reefius]

It's funny how some people believe a synth will sound better if it can produce waveforms that look perfect in an analyzer, while it's actually the opposite. It's the imperfections that make a synth sound great.

[chk071]

It's funny how some people believe a synth will sound better if it can produce waveforms that look perfect in an analyzer

... or... they think the added harmonics due to it not being a perfect sine, or the saturation harmonics added by the filter is aliasing.

[jeffb01]

It's funny how some people believe a synth will sound better if it can produce waveforms that look perfect in an analyzer, while it's actually the opposite. It's the imperfections that make a synth sound great.

this. though I love wave shaping and wave distortion.

[Maeldron]

It’s such an unfinished product it’s not even in a beta state. I take it as an offense they released it like this.

As someone who has worked on multiple private alpha and beta testing teams, and who used to be the head tech support person for a developer, I find your statement offensive. It's patently false.

But I guess you didn’t have to pay for my statement. It was free. Massive X was not.

[Maeldron]

It's not false. Beta is feature complete but may have bugs. What we have been given is not feature complete therefore it's alpha.

Wrong. Features can always be added during the lifetime of the product. Zebra 2 had a bunch of updates in 10+ years it's been around, for example. In modern times, there's no such thing as "feature complete" really.

If there is a Search icon on the top, and you cannot search, it’s not even beta. That’s so simple.

Not to mention the non-functional envelope graphs.

For someone else:

What is a feature request in expecting that about 30% of the GUI elements, put there by the developer, not for my request, should be more than decoration?