Opinions on MassiveX

[chk071]

This seems to be the logical starting point: https://www.native-instruments.com/de/p ... x/manuals/

I never liked Massive or Serum but I do like Massive X. Great routing options and sound quality. Yes I’d like an extra oscillator and filter and the presets browser could be better but those aren’t massive issues for me.

I never really liked Massive much, but, Serum is alright really. Nice synth. Just too expensive, and, the no sales tactic doesn't help to boost my interest either.

It's really beyond me, once again, why such developers don't do sales. "I don't believe in sales" is kind of bullshit, when your synth doesn't sell much after 2 or 3 years, and you could sell 4 or 5 times as many copies, when you split the price in half.

[Functional]

Where do think I should start with learning Massive X? I'm kind of a beginner at this.

Where are you at right now in terms of synth expertise? Can you manage something like Serum easily - or if not Serum - something else? I can write a proper response but it matters a lot to know your current skill level

[BONES]

I never liked Massive or Serum but I do like Massive X. Great routing options and sound quality. Yes I’d like an extra oscillator and filter and the presets browser could be better but those aren’t massive issues for me.

I think you mean they are not "Massive X issues" for you. Sorry, couldn't help myself.

[EnGee]

Where do think I should start with learning Massive X? I'm kind of a beginner at this.

I always start with the manual. NI is famous for great manuals as well
https://www.native-instruments.com/file ... 112019.pdf

Open the manual with the synth also loaded, so you can practice every bit your read, then read the manual from cover to cover and repeat as necessary! This is the classic way and the most efficient for me

I didn't find a good tutorial online that I can say it is better than the manual! But it doesn't hurt after that to watch some tips in YouTube, but really the manual will be more than enough.

In my case I did that with the original Massive. It is also a great learning experience and the original Massive has great manual as well:
https://www.native-instruments.com/file ... h_0119.pdf

See you after one year Just kidding! It depends on you and how much time and effort you spend learning

[elassi]

There's a quickstart manual on NI's website as well: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/m ... uickstart/

[DuX]

I think it is massive... but depends what. NI products haven't really been that great last more than a couple of years for me. They left me completely "meh". Still, I find products like Kontakt 4/5 and Battery 3 quite good. FM7 and FM8 also.

Just saying.

[EnGee]

There's a quickstart manual on NI's website as well: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/m ... uickstart/

That's a good one.

I think it is massive... but depends what. NI products haven't really been that great last more than a couple of years for me. They left me completely "meh". Still, I find products like Kontakt 4/5 and Battery 3 quite good. FM7 and FM8 also.

Just saying.

Really? I believe there are great new synths there. Yes, they are all Reaktor based, but they are "super" synths IMO! Form and Super 8 sound fantastic. Razor, Kontour, Monark, Rounds and Prism as well. Not forgetting the great Blocks in Reaktor 6. I sometimes wonder if I ever need another synth in my life oh! and Maschine kits are so damn good! I really can use only NI Komplete with Maschine and not miss anything else

[RobGee]

This seems to be the logical starting point: https://www.native-instruments.com/de/p ... x/manuals/

I never liked Massive or Serum but I do like Massive X. Great routing options and sound quality. Yes I’d like an extra oscillator and filter and the presets browser could be better but those aren’t massive issues for me.

I never really liked Massive much, but, Serum is alright really. Nice synth. Just too expensive, and, the no sales tactic doesn't help to boost my interest either.

It's really beyond me, once again, why such developers don't do sales. "I don't believe in sales" is kind of bullshit, when your synth doesn't sell much after 2 or 3 years, and you could sell 4 or 5 times as many copies, when you split the price in half.

I've never really looked at the price of Serum if I'm honest. I kept hearing people raving about it and tried the demo but found the sound too sterile and uninspiring, maybe if I spent more time with it but it just wasn't for me. With Massive X you can add some really nice character with the filters, feedback routing and effects etc, it reminds me a bit of Reaktor Blocks but with polyphony.

I never liked Massive or Serum but I do like Massive X. Great routing options and sound quality. Yes I’d like an extra oscillator and filter and the presets browser could be better but those aren’t massive issues for me.

I think you mean they are not "Massive X issues" for you. Sorry, couldn't help myself.

I honestly didn't notice that pun, it must've been subconscious

[3ptguitarist]

Where do think I should start with learning Massive X? I'm kind of a beginner at this.

Where are you at right now in terms of synth expertise? Can you manage something like Serum easily - or if not Serum - something else? I can write a proper response but it matters a lot to know your current skill level

I'm very much of a beginner. Barely know some of the terminology and barely know how the terms work such as LFO, sine wave. I think I can familiarize myself with some synth terms, but I dont know them that well and dont know how to create my own sounds. So no I can't manage serum. Haven't even tried it.

[Sinisterbr]

I just remembered a severe drawback for me in MX: There's no displaying of numerics values when you tweak anything. That's just plain stupid. It should be up to the user to decide. I Hope they fix that at some point.

[Sinisterbr]

Where do think I should start with learning Massive X? I'm kind of a beginner at this.

Where are you at right now in terms of synth expertise? Can you manage something like Serum easily - or if not Serum - something else? I can write a proper response but it matters a lot to know your current skill level

I'm very much of a beginner. Barely know some of the terminology and barely know how the terms work such as LFO, sine wave. I think I can familiarize myself with some synth terms, but I dont know them that well and dont know how to create my own sounds. So no I can't manage serum. Haven't even tried it.

Maybe you should start learning synthesis with a simple free synth then (there's plenty of nice ones), and once you get a little hang of it, you'd jump into MX. I'd say MX could be kinda overwhelming for a beginner.
OTOH.. do what you want! It's not like you're learning nuclear physics here, at some point you'll get it all and, besides, MX is really cool.

[HTT]

Where do think I should start with learning Massive X? I'm kind of a beginner at this.

Where are you at right now in terms of synth expertise? Can you manage something like Serum easily - or if not Serum - something else? I can write a proper response but it matters a lot to know your current skill level

I'm very much of a beginner. Barely know some of the terminology and barely know how the terms work such as LFO, sine wave. I think I can familiarize myself with some synth terms, but I dont know them that well and dont know how to create my own sounds. So no I can't manage serum. Haven't even tried it.

I would suggest the free Zebralette: https://u-he.com/products/zebralette/

and/or Synthmaster One: https://www.kv331audio.com/synthmasterone.aspx

as good starting points to try.

[Functional]

Where do think I should start with learning Massive X? I'm kind of a beginner at this.

Where are you at right now in terms of synth expertise? Can you manage something like Serum easily - or if not Serum - something else? I can write a proper response but it matters a lot to know your current skill level

I'm very much of a beginner. Barely know some of the terminology and barely know how the terms work such as LFO, sine wave. I think I can familiarize myself with some synth terms, but I dont know them that well and dont know how to create my own sounds. So no I can't manage serum. Haven't even tried it.

Honestly the manual is a good place to start in then. It might be helpful to understand couple things about synths overall:

- All synths require some way to generate sound. Massive X has actually a ton of sound-generation possibilities, but you shouldn't concern yourself with any other except the actual oscillators for now (and noise oscillators, if you want some noise into your synth). Massive X oscillators belong to a "wavetable" oscillator category which means that in order to operate, they need a wavetable in them (provided by the synth itself) and by scrolling through the wavetable, you get different kinds of waveforms for the oscillator. In many cases, the sound of the patch will be highly dependent on which waveforms you use. As a beginner, you might want to explore the ones that are loaded by default - those are considered as the basic waveforms.

- As with any synth, sound not only has to come from somewhere, but it has to go somewhere. Massive X is special due to its semi-modular nature: by opening the "routing" tab, you actually can visually see the path that the sound takes (and you can change that path too; but you shouldn't boggle your head too much with the routing with zero knowledge). The standard routing goes like this: oscillator a & oscillator b -> insert a -> filter -> insert b -> insert c -> monophonic effects section.

- Aforementioned inserts are kind of like "effects", just like in the monophonic effects, but they are polyphonic rather than monophonic. This means that each individual note you play, it goes through its own chain up until the monophonic section. While not revolutionary, this is non-standard behavior actually as usually effects in synthesizers are all monophonic. Experiment with them to see what each effect sounds like - you will likely love some and hate others. As you get more experience, you should take a closer look at the effects you hated and give them another try with the additional insight

- Filter is pretty special thing - as the name implies, it's meant to filter out some frequencies (in general) while keeping others. As a starting point, I'd recommend playing around with the blue monark low pass filter - all the other filters have their uses, but this is kind of the thing you'll be using 90% of the times.

- And lastly, envelopes are meant to modulate parameters. Skip using the exciter envelope for now (unless the manual explains to you how it can be used - then try it out). The other kind of envelope is the one you want to be using 99% of the time. When you assign an envelope to some other parameter, it basically will adjust that parameter according to the envelope itself. The first envelope is always going to be amp envelope (the leftmost blue envelope, it even is called "amp envelope"); this is the envelope that controls the amplitude of the synth. You can assign it to other things too, but you can't deassign it from the amplitude. To get an idea of basic ways to use an envelope, you can design a simple sawtooth sound and use the amp envelope attack; by increasing the attack, it slowly starts to sound like a pad rather than a lead. You can assign it to a filter and do the same thing with it: open the filter up slowly, or alternatively aggressively. Pluck sounds are often made by assigning an envelope to the filter frequency cutoff value with a short attack, semi-short decay and either none or low sustain.

There's so much more, but this is sort of the barebone basics. I'd assume that the manual itself will help you to get some idea on how to operate this synth. And once you understand synths in general, you can largely use any synth actually unless they have some particular gimmicks which need some time to figure out.

[Functional]

I just remembered a severe drawback for me in MX: There's no displaying of numerics values when you tweak anything. That's just plain stupid. It should be up to the user to decide. I Hope they fix that at some point.

While I want to agree with this, it turns out that implementing this isn't so simple. In fact, it's often flat-out inaccurate.

Take the filter frequency cutoff for example. Display the hz, right? Well, the problem is, it doesn't work too accurately like that. When you up the resonance to get that sine wave out of the blue monark and you keytrack it and tune it so that when you play C3, the resonance will be at C3, you will notice that it actually still will go out of tune with some notes. This is because of imperfections with the filter.

BUT, I do think they could have added a lock-point on the filter to get it as close to being tuned as possible without the process of tuning it yourself. It's annoying to do every darn time manually.

[elassi]

A simple reason for having numeric values is to get back to a starting point when you tweaked something and are not happy with it. In case you copied the value beforehand (or remember the value) it's easier to go back. Admittedly, it doesn't happen that often.