Native instruments massive update

VST plugins can be used in a wide variety of ways to create synth sounds for songwriting and production. There are several varieties of VST plugins for synth sounds that are worth noting. Polyphonic VST plugins create more than one note at a time, so are great for building complex melodies, chords, and harmonies, while monophonic VST plugins play one note at a time and are commonly used for basslines.

Some VST plugins strictly model themselves on reproducing sounds you would expect from analogue instruments, but others go way beyond that. Trying things out and exploring new territory is hugely important when trying to craft something unique, and using multiple VST plugins will give you a wide range of instruments and sounds to work with.

Chaining multiple VST plugins together sis a typical way to start crafting a sound you can call your own. Think it up, dial it in, and define what the future sounds like. Check out the quickstart guide to learn the basic workflow and start creating your own sounds. Choose from over wavetables and 10 different modes of reading them — from the aggressive Gorilla family, to a wavetable-bending mode, Hardsync, Formant, and many more — each with their own unique sub-modes and additional controls.

Dial in two phase-modulation oscillators to inject extra movement into the main oscillators. You can then use the Remote Octave control to trigger them on your keyboard, meaning you get truly playable modulation and huge expressive variety within a single patch. Use them as they are, to kick off your own patches, or to experiment and learn more about how the synth works.

Assign pitch bend, modwheel, and aftertouch to modulate any parameter for extra playability. Expansions contain presets for a certain genre, mood, or utility, so you have killer sounds when you need them fast. You can place two insert effects at various places within the signal flow.

You can also take the signal at any point and route it back to the beginning. For example, you can filter a sound and feed it back into the filter's input. This can create very lively and dynamic results. The flexibility is further increased by placing an insert effect into the feedback path.

This feature allows a direct 'punch' to be added to layered, highly modulated sounds, for example to add a sub bass. Multiple parameters can be assigned to a single macro control, bundling technical settings into a single control — a far more musical approach. For instance, you can assign both the filters' cutoff frequencies to one macro control and label it as 'Brightness'.

The envelopes in MASSIVE feature an advanced loop mode: a part of the envelope can be looped and you can morph between different transitions or crossfades for the defined loop start and end points. MASSIVE contains two step sequencer modes: While the Stepper conforms to the well-known, established operating modes, the Performer allows each step to be shaped individually, making it ideal for advanced rhythmic structures.

A flexible low frequency oscillator completes the list of modulation sources. The variety of possibilities is as wide as it is fast to use.

This is further enhanced by the inclusion of templates for standard tasks for all the modulation sources, such as envelopes, LFOs, steppers and performers. For example, setting an envelope to a generic ADSR shape is a quick, one-click issue.