So, what do people who have used Massive think of it?

How does it sound? How does it compare with other NI products?

Does it give a lot of sonic potential that you can't get out of, say Reactor 5?

 

as far as i can tell ...it is not availible in eastern us yet...i am looking forward to hearing it in demo form...

v. ronci gaeta

 

I live in Germany and it is not available until 12.10.06, as I was told by the sales people. So who could have this synth by now? I read an article of the preview in the Keyboards magazine and there was no criticism in it except that it isn´t very suitable for very smooth and thin pads (which I think was a little joke, because of the name), but hey it is called MASSIVE and that´s why I ordered it, and the demo sounds are great!

Deepbass

 

Hi there!

Massive not sound like reaktor, Massive sound like " Massive" ;-)


All the best
Antonio Blanca

 

Actually, quite a few retailers have it in stock and are selling it already. And then there's the sound designers and testers; they've had it for quite a while. Speaking of the sound designers;

True, and some of your presets really show off what Massive can do

ew

 

This got here yesterday. I like it a lot so far, but I've not had too much of a chance to play with it yet... Actually I just finished setting up a control surface for use with it so hopefully I'll be able to dive in a bit with programming it tonight...

I wouldn't say that it "sounds like Reaktor", though to be honest that induces a bit of eyerolling in me and I'm not even sure what that is supposed to mean (I'm not trying to take a swipe at Jason here, I've heard "sounds like Reaktor" in a bunch of places now and of course there was the huge thread at kvr...).

The interface on it kicks ass and is really easy to use. Soundwise I've mostly fooled around with presets so far, there are a bunch of good and interesting ones.

Since no thread outside of the Reaktor forum is complete without some *****ing, here I go: the MIDI implementation sure seems to suck it up. No way to assign AT to a macro knob, the impressively useless way in which MIDI CC gets mapped to the osc pitch controls, no support for rotaries (would be nice with the high reso knobs on this thing), doesn't seem to send out CCs in response to changes in the knob values on the screen...

Particularly the latter two.

Anyway, I don't mean to be down on it, it seems really great actually. Just haven't had a chance to get very in-depth yet.

 

Just to be clear, I never it sounds like reaktor.

I said:

"Does it give a lot of sonic potential that you can't get out of, say Reactor 5?"

 

Yes, I know, thus the explanatory sentence where I said I had heard that in several other places and (poorly) attempted to clarify that I was not talking about your post. It reminded me of those statements even though you did not make such a statement yourself.

Anyway a lot of my posts are poorly written and thought-out and that one probably wasn't an exception.

To better answer your question, I think that it is rather different from anything available in the factory Reaktor ensembles or in the UL. But I guess it depends on what you mean by "can't", what kind of sonic potential you happen to care about, and how you prefer to get there. It is as modern as most of NI's other products.

In my experience so far, I think the fundamental thing that sets it apart from other products (NI's or not) is the ease with which you can create expressive or "alive" sounds.

 

Why do you need to assign AT to a macro knob? AT's assignable to control anything- it's in the keygroups menu for each modulation input.

I've never tried it with a MIDI controller with rotaries, but it works fine with KORE's rotaries.

ew

 

For the AT, just convenience, basically, it's a small thing anyway. Of course I can reassign it but if I am in the browser panel looking for a sound I don't really want to flip to the synth side and go looking for all the modulations and so on and so forth.

Actually I'm curious about how it works with Kore, do the Kore knobs always map to the 8 macro knobs or can you move them around to all the different parameters?

 

With KORE you have eight pages as default pages and an unlimited amount of user pages (however, only the first eight user pages can be used by the host for automation if KORE's a plugin). You step through the pages using the cursor on the controller. The macros are the first default page; if you want to use them with the controller with KORE as a plugin, just copy the page to one of the first eight user pages.

So yes, they're always assigned but there's lots more options.

ew

 

What's the CPU hit like? Is it Absynth-lite or Reaktor-heavy?

 

It's on the high side.

Part of this is due to how Massive initializes- it initializes the voices in groups of four. Play one voice and the CPU meter will read 10% . The second, third and fourth voice won't really raise this- maybe by 3% total or so. The fifth voice will bump it up another 10%. The same thing happens with the next three voices as with voices 2, 3 and 4- about 1% per voice. The ninth will bounce it up 10%...

There's low and high quality options (with a medium quality option coming); and you can set it globally or per patch. Personally, I use low quality until it's time to render.

16 voices in low quality will average around 30-35% on my 3500+. High quality will double this.

ew

 

wow, that is pretty high ew! :O

I've only had my 2ghz Centrino M for about 6 months, its obsolete already!

there's a great line from Wierd Al Yankovic's song "All About The Pentiums"

"You've had your desktop for over a week,
Throw that thing away, man, its an antique"

 

Thanks for the figures ew. I figured it would be on the high side. The latest generation of great-sounding vsts are all pretty cpu expensive.

Is there a mono mode that uses less cpu? I get a lot of extra mileage out of Reaktor ensembles by turning the number of voices down to 1 for mono parts. Reaktor seems to have some overhead for extra voices, even if they're unused.

 

Yeah, there is a mono mode, but you'll still have a minimum of four voices initialized. For those of you who have the juice, there's also a unison mode in both poly and mono states with some unique twists- you can specify wavetable position spread, for example. And, any of the widening choices in unison can be modulated by any of the options for modulation.

ew

 

Sounds pretty juicy. Looking forward to playing with it.

One of my favorite things about the Moog filter in the Virus and the Vaz modular filters is that if you crank up the resonance *and* the filter saturation instead of sharp resonance you start to get a warm harmonic distortion. Can you pull similar tricks with the Massive filters?

 

Yeah, you can. You also have a feedback loop that you can introduce in various set locations in the chain through the routing window (only one location per patch, though)- this does wonders for warming up sounds. The insert effects work the same way- there's a frequency shifter, a couple different saturators and the like. Like the feedback, they aren't hard wired- choose where they go through the routing window.

ew

 

Definitely sounds like fun. Looking forward to trying it out. Any stability issues?

I wonder if Massive means the end of the line for Pro-53 or if NI's going to continue to do vintage emulations.

 

The feedback feature is really great BTW.

I haven't had any stability issues yet.

The only possible bug I've noticed so far is that sometimes the rings around the knobs seem to draw incorrectly or not at all, this might just be my inexperience with it causing me to miss something, though.

The more I use it the more I like it, I think NI really outdid themselves on this one.