Designing sounds with Massive X

Native Instruments released Massive X sometime in 2019 with the latest version 1.2 coming out in December of the same year. It’s meant to be the upgrade to the ever popular Massive, beloved by countless producers and sound designers.

I bought Massive X when it came out, but with the plethora of soft synths I have at my disposal its been little wonder that I haven’t spent much time with it. Today, I decided to change that.

As is customary I threw the manual out the window, burnt the quick start guide and started twiddling knobs until weird things started happening.

The quality of sound coming out of this thing is a definite improvement over its precursor. It feels very much like a Reaktor Blocks ensemble, especially when you’re on the routing page. The amount of parameters that you can modulate are quite staggering. The global controls which are at the top of the plugin at all times is easy to to setup. The GUI seems a bit cluttered at first, but if you know your way around a synth it doesn’t take long to figure out where everything is. Added to that its seems to be quite CPU friendly. I’m running it on an 9th gen i7 with 8GB RAM and it only eats about 1.5% CPU with almost all modules active.

Long time Massive users have had some issues with it, but for someone who doesn’t carry the baggage of the previous synth its quite a joy to use. Definitely worth checking out.

Here’s some noise from a patch I made within about 30 minutes from opening it up and twiddling knobs.

It also has a great library of patches that have varying levels of complexity. Advanced synth users should be able to squeeze very creative sounds out of it.