First Look at Massive X – Synth Spotlight

I was graced by the gods (by whom I mean Native Instruments) with an early release of Massive X and I was able to play around with it to create this comprehensive video review.
Enjoy.


VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Massive X, this is a big overhaul of Massive. It’s a totally new synth from the ground up, but it still has some elements from Massive so, it feels like Massive and a brand new synth at the same time. It’s really nice.

So, this is Synth Spotlight, I’ll be focused on the usual thing which is what makes this synth interesting. Why it stands out from other synths, why you should care. But I’ll also touch upon, you know how things have changed from Massive, what they brought along and how they’ve changed it. S

o, the centerpiece of this thing is the Routing panel. If you remember, old Massive, original Massive, it had a Routing panel as well. And this allowed you to do a few things like these instant effects down here, you could determine where they were in the signal path. So, if I click there, it’s position between Oscillator and Filter. Or I could put it after the filter, a few things like that. It was limited, but it was pretty cool.

However, Massive X has taken that idea and ran with it creating pretty much a total modular architecture. Right here, we’ve got how everything is connected. So, right now we’ve got Oscillator one and two, Noise one and Noise two down here. And then it goes through a chain, we’ve got A, B and C insert effects, that’s A, B, and C. We have the filter F, that’s represented down here. And so you can see the chain.

The oscillator is going into insert effect A, which then goes into the filter, which then goes into insert B, insert C, and then out into our effects and eventually out the end. So, just there was basic example. Let’s say, I set up insert effect B, as a you know, maybe distortion. Or let’s do a Bitcrusher actually. So don’t- right now because the filter is before it. As I change this frequency, the cutoff of our low pass filter doesn’t make it rounder, it just changes the sound going in our Bitcrusher, which then kind of brightens it again in various ways.

So, maybe I’m thinking, well, you know, I want the Bitcrusher before that. I wanna filter the Bitcrusher sound. Easy. All we have to do is disconnect our filter, and our Bitcrusher, and reconnect things in a different order. Then now, we get our crush sound, that is then is then filtered. So, that’s just a basic example of how to use this. It’s the tip of the iceberg. There’s a million things you can do with this Routing panel.

I’m gonna go through all the different modules up here. And you’ll find that I keep coming back to the Routing panel. It’s such an integrative part of it. And it creates so much flexibility in this synth.

Alright, so let’s jump in and start with our Oscillators up here. So, two Wavetable Oscillators, a lot of Wavetables here. Way more than the original Massive. And they actually brought some of the original Massive ones along under remastered, which is a nice touch. Each of these Oscillators also has a bunch of modes, I call them like, “Morph modes.”

If you remember, the original Massive had that as well. We had the spectrum bends and format, allowed you to kinda morph the waveforms in various ways. Well, now that we’ve got even more of those, and each of them has their own sort of subset as well. One new one they created was called Gorilla, which I really like. Which let me initialize our sound. Before I show you that. Okay. Go to Gorilla. Now listen to this. It’s like a really aggressive sync. But this itself has a few different versions. So this is King, changed to Kang. So, not only do we have all these wavetables to work with, we’ve had a lot of ways we can mess with them, and morph them.

Now, if you aren’t familiar with the original Massive, you may be asking, well they got rid of an oscillator… And that’s true, we got two wavetable oscillators instead of three. However, instead of having three of these, they threw in an additional three subtractive oscillators. If you go over to the, Insert effects, you’ll see oscillator. This is a subtractive oscillator.

So, what I’m going to do is, break this, break off all these. Send B and bring this over here and connect it to the beginning of our chain, and now, I have a additional oscillator to work with. One, you know, common use that comes to mind is a sub oscillator. And you got a few different options here. Standard, Subtractive waveforms.

Another use for this. Let’s say you wanna add in, a sine wave, layer that in to create some fatness in your sound. And thanks to our Routing panel, you know, let’s say we have a bunch of effects going on. Our sound’s really going crazy. But we want a pure sine wave, you know to layer in, give it some body, we don’t want it affected by everything. No problem, so move it directly to the output. And now, we can do whatever we want to our main sound, our sine wave will be untouched. Or maybe we wanted to go through just one of the effects. Okay, fine, we can do that. So again, you see how great this Routing panel is. It really lets you wire up this synth any way you want.

Alright, one more thing about these oscillators is along with our two wavetable oscillators and our three insert oscillators. We have two dedicated phase modulation oscillators. So, phase modulation PM creates a sound that’s pretty much identical to frequency modulation. FM synths, soft synths, usually are using PM instead of actual FM. But you get an FM sound. So these are basically, two oscillators dedicated to giving us FM sound.

All you gotta do is enable PM one, set this to a sine wave. And now this knob will increase the amount of phase modulation that supplied to Oscillator one. And what I really like, a nice touch here is this pitch control is done in ratio. So one means it’s the same pitch as Oscillator one, two means it’s octave higher. We could go half, octave lower. This is how FM synths do it. So if you’re familiar with FM synth programming, you really like this. If you don’t like that, no problem, turn on key track and it’s good old semitones.

Now, we’ve got two of these, and we can route them in various ways. I could have them both modulating Oscillator one, or, you know, one to one, two to two. And on top of that, we had this auxiliary phase modulation source, where we can wire up anything we want to this and it becomes our phase modulation source. One example would be, over here in our Inserts. We have A Phase Modulation Oscillator. That’s the guy right here. To use it, all we gotta do is wire it to this box, PM auxiliary. Whatever is connected into here, then becomes our auxiliary phase modulation source. So, enable auxiliary. you turn this one down.

So, in reality, we have five different Phase Modulation Oscillators and we can wire them to one and two in various ways. So it gives us kind of a mini FM synth inside of this big wave table synth. Very nice touch. And because of the Routing panel, we can do some strange things here, like, I could change C to Bitcrusher, and I do have to connect the input to get it to work. But, let’s turn this off. So it’s kind of bizarre. But this just as an example, we can use anything as our phase modulation source. Or, another example, we could do FM feedback where the oscillator that’s being modulated is also the modulation source.

It’s actually a great way to get kind of like a saw-like sound. So, tons of options with the oscillators. And lastly, there is a unison section, set the number of voices, the width, the spread, you can create chords, all sorts of options here.

Alright, before I move on to these next sections, I just wanna briefly mention that this video is brought to you by, us Audible Genius, the creators of Syntorial. Syntorial is videogame-like training software, that’ll teach you how to program synth patches by ear. Whole goal of this training App is to get you to the point where you can take the sounds you hear. Whether they’re in your head, or music you’re listening to and be able to create them on a synth.

Briefly, here’s how it works. I’m gonna grab a random lesson. Starts with a video. So, in this video, I demonstrate something. Maybe I talk about filters, maybe I talk about waveforms. And I go through, demonstrate them, explain them. You then go to a challenge. In this challenge, you’re given a hidden patch. I can hear it, but I can’t see it, I have to go over to my patch, which is a plain saw, and I have to recreate it all by ear. So it’s all about ear training.

That’s what synthesis is all about. You have to train your ear. Otherwise, you’re just guessing. You got to be able to take the sounds you hear and make them. Now, I’m not gonna make any changes here. I’m gonna submit this to see how I did. Obviously I did terrible because I didn’t make any changes. But here’s what happens, any controls that are correct, are green, and the ones that are wrong are red, and I can make the changes and hear the difference.

You start showing your ear the difference. Now, it starts incredibly simple. The first lesson is about, Saw and Pulse Waveforms. Saw and Pulse, I just talk about those two waveforms, I demonstrate them. And the challenge, all it is the waveform, you’re recreating patches with just one control. It gradually adds one control at a time until you get to the very end. In which you’re doing the whole synth.

Starts out simple, gets complex, trains your ear. Try it out, free demo, first 22 lessons link in the description. Okay, shut up, Joe. Back to Massive X.

All right, moving on, noise. Pretty simple here, but there’s two of them. And you might be wondering, why would you need two noises. Well, like the original Massive, this is more than just your typical white or pink noise. Let’s turn down this. Turn you on. You’ve got all sorts of stuff. So it’s more like a sampler in a way. Adds a whole new texture. I personally like the grizzly. So, if you’ve been thinking, “Man, I need a synth That creates some grizzly bear sounds”, look no further.

Right, so you got two of those nice. Filter. All right, we got a lot of filter options. And each one of them has a subset. So like this monarch, which I think is kind of like a Moogy analog filter, it’s got you know, a few different pulse settings or slope settings for the low pass, bandpass, peak, and each one of these has its own sort of sub settings.

So there’s this one called Creek which is really more like a distortion, few different types of sub distortions, and which I’m really happy about as they added this Gain knob , so we can Push the filter, get some warmth out of it. I find that’s very important in synths nowadays to get that nice, warm, analog-y sound. And you also might be thinking, well look, the old Massive had two filters, And you can route them various ways. This only has one. So isn’t that a downgrade? No.

First off, they substituted that with two sort of pre-made dual filters in typical ways. So like this is a parallel, you can choose two filters to combine in parallel. So low pass, high pass. Your sounds will run into a low pass, also a high pass, and that’s combined at the end. And so there’s just some common combinations for that. Or you can do serial, which is just a high pass, running into a low pass.

These are real common ways to use dual filters. So rather than have that complexity of having to manage those two filters, they did this instead. I like it, it just makes it more user friendly, while still giving you a lot of capability. I never really use dual filters that much anyway, personally. Okay, now along with this gain knob, we also have feedback, which again was in the old Massive, so if I. This takes the output of the filter, sticks it back into the input, so you create this rill, saturated sound. However, thanks to our Routing panel, we can apply a feedback loop to anything.

Example. I’m gonna take B, and put Anima. It’s kinda like a flanger. Alright, I want this thing to feedback, how can I do that? Well, our feedback route is determined down here. This is the beginning of our feedback loop, this is the end. So, our filter’s currently connected to it. The end goes into the feedback loop, and then that feedback loop comes back into the beginning of the filter. That’s why we get the sound we get when we increase our feedback.

You can do that to anything. I’m gonna create a feedback loop around Anima. Oops. A lot of experimentation here. What can I do with a feedback loop? What I like even better though. This reconnecting this. So, the output of Anima goes back into the filter and get this two module feedback loop.

Another thing I love about this Routing panel, feedback whatever you want to feed back. All right, so let’s go on to our Effects section. We got three of them X, Y and Z. A nice robust set of Effects, Reverbs, Delays, kind of standard stuff. Each of these has its own subset, though. So by going to reverb, tons of reverb types, you got a lot to work with here, very nice. One I wanna talk about in particular is this Nonlinear Lab.

On the surface, it just seems like a kind of a standard distortion, few different types. But what I love about this, is down here, this is an amp simulator. Toss it through a big reverb. Epic guitar sound. Love that effect. And, we can route these in various ways. So you can connect various modules into either X, Y or Z. And go here, here here. And we can route the actual effects in different ways. X, this is a pure serial Routing, X into Y into Z. We could do X and Y parallel. So, modules go into them separately, it’s summed, and then everything’s run through Z, or they’re all parallel, separate, and then summed at the end.

So more flexibility there with how our effects are routed. Alright, so that’s all of our modules up here. Let’s talk about our Modulation sources. We’ve got an envelope, right? Good old standard modulation envelope ADSR, with an extra hold period and a delay period, the beginning. A lot of options here, nothing super special. What I like is this exciter envelope. We turn off our effects here. Exciter envelope is basically an attack transient designer. It’s just for creating attack transients. Makes sense because that’s what we use envelopes a lot for. So this is just dedicated to that.

So I’m gonna route this to our pitch and change a couple settings here, I’ll explain what these are doing in a second. A ratio is basically the length of it. This is a really fast decay, creating a little attack transient with our pitch. But we can do various things with this. Like if I put center in the middle, we get both an attack and a decay. That is by the way, that’s as slow as it’s gonna go. This is just for short envelope transients. They go all the way this way. I squashed the attack, it’s all decay. Or this way, it’s all attack sloping up, and I can even hold it at the top. So it’s purely a little attack transient designer. It’s a nice touch since that’s we use envelopes for a lot.

Okay, next let’s talk about some LFO’s. Switch your LFO, let’s route it to cutoff. And by the way how we route things is the same just like the original Massive, just drag and then set the amount like this. So we have some standard waveforms here, square, sine triangle. But then we have all these interesting ones.

And I have to admit I really like this knob, there’s something really satisfying about it. And I mean a bunch of other standard controls here. What I like though, this nice touch is over here, I’m gonna increase our amp envelope, release, loop GTE. This is only gonna apply when my note is held down. When I let go it’ll go straight. Or the opposite loop release. When I’m holding the key, it’s a long note, when I let go, the LFO kicks in.

Interesting, one shot treats this like a envelope just goes through once. One shot release, only when we release the key. So it’s kind of interesting. I don’t know how I’d use that. But it’s different enough that I want to use it. Random LFO. So, this is like a sample and hold that you can tweak and control. By default, all it is a triangle wave. If I increase the Amp jitter, it’s gonna randomize the LFO amount. Frequency jitter will randomize the rate. So you can dial these in exactly how you want them.

Instead of a triangle wave, we can do a square wave and that’ll jump between values instead of smoothly bending between them. That’s like a standard sample and hold. So tweakable random LFO. Last, is our performer. Well, there’s a couple others, they’re kind of boring. This is a key tracking like no pitch velocity, really in depth though. So if you use key tracking a lot or use velocity a lot, and you’re obsessed with how it responds across the whole scale of the keyboard, or all the velocities you could Really dial this in specifically.

And this is voice routing. This allows you to randomly change the destination with every key press. Interesting. However, what I find way more interesting is this performer. This thing allows you to draw in, whatever modulation shapes you want in terms of song structure, song length, loops, rhythmic values, all sorts of edit modes. It’s basically like a little tiny DAW inside of the synth. And rather than me kind of dialing and show this to you,

I’m gonna bring up an example. Where is that one? Here it is. So, using all three of these performers, each one just has a different shape drawn in. You see this, you couldn’t do this with an LFO. Every single use is changing as it goes along. Look at all that, and it’s all routed to various aspects of our wave table, volume, filter… Sort of being used, three different shapes for three different things creates the sound of all these different voices playing. And on top of that, just to show you how this is being used as like a song maker in a sense, we’ve got different versions of it.

So, they created scat one which are these three patterns. Then scat two, three different patterns. Scat three, yet another set of patterns and meditation which is just nothing. Oops, meditation which is just holding the note. And, what’s interesting is that they won’t trigger until I play a new note. So, watch this. Okay. Now I’m gonna hit two but it’s not playing it. It won’t until I play a new note right here. Now three, oh, hold on. And three. And end it with four.

So this really is, it’s like a little mini composer inside of the synth. Again, kinda like the Routing panel, there’s like a million things you could do here. Lastly, I’m gonna show you one more preset as a cool example of what you can do with this Routing panel. And that is… cause I’m obsessed with this Routing panel, Caps Lock.

All right, it sounds like three different synths. That’s thanks to this Routing panels. Let me spread it out a little bit so you can see what’s going on. All right, Oscillator one, going into distortion, and then out. Oscillator two, going into Utility Insert Effect, which is basically like a simple filter that’s going to do a different effect, Delay and then out.

Noise, going into a Comb filter, which is then going out to yet another effect, Reverb. But also, this Comb filter is going out into a Delay Insert Effect. And then a feedback loop is created with the end of that delay going, back into the comb filter. But, on top of all that, our second noise oscillator running through Utility insert effect again, is then being used as our Auxiliary Phase Modulation source, which in turn is modulating oscillator one and our auxiliary sources also being modulated by LFO three.

The reason I like this is there are other synths that have this kind of modular architecture. But, there’s something about this that is easy to see, for me. It’s incredibly complex, but it doesn’t feel overwhelming. I can literally just see where everything is. And I can move things around that make it a little more easier for me to see and understand. I don’t know, it’s just that perfect marriage of complexity and ease that I just love in a good synth.

All right, that’s Massive X. I this is know this is kinda long video but, lots of good stuff in this synth. So, I encourage you to try it out. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel If you need any help with patches, specific patches on any synth, really, head on over to our forum and put in a patch request. And again, don’t forget to try out Syntorial.

Synth Spotlight – Blipblox

Blipbox is a synth made by Playtime Engineering and if the name doesn’t give it away, it’s meant for kids. Don’t worry though, adults can use it too – we won’t tell.


VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to a special Father’s Day edition of Synth Spotlight. We’re going to talk about the Blipblox today. This is a great way to get your kids started on synths and it’s actually usable for you as well, depending on aesthetic and the sound you’re going for in your music. So it looks like a toy and that’s obviously for a good reason. It’s for your kid, it’s meant to attract a kid to it.

But each one of these buttons, each one of these little controls actually controls a legitimate synth parameter. So, I’m going to get the sequencer started. You can change the sequence, click of a button. Bunch of preloaded sequences. And then we can start changing it. So you got tempo over here. Got waveforms. Low-pass filter. Sort of a note length. So it’s kinda like an amp envelope decay and release. long notes. Short notes. We also have two LFOs and a mod envelope that you can modulate the oscillator and the filter with.

There’s this randomize button which just changes all the controls that wants to do something random. Giving a whole new sound. Then one unique thing, this thing has this freakout button. When I hold this down, it’s just gonna go nuts. And then we’ve got a kick and a snare. Okay, so number one question here is do kids like it?

Well, I tried it with my two year old son, Ellington who’s almost three and he loved it, check it out. So obviously, he doesn’t understand what these different controls are doing yet, but he’s actually interacting with legitimate synth parameters. He’s interacting with filters, with tempo, with LFOs. Without even knowing it, he’s programming a synth.

And then as he gets older, and then he gets to an age were he understands this stuff, I can start to explain this stuff. I can tell him this is low-pass filter. I can, tell him these are different waveforms changing the raw sound that he’s working with. So it’s a great way to get your kids started. Now, how about you? Can you use this in your music?

This isn’t your ordinary synth tutorial. This is Syntorial. Making programming synths easy. With video game like training teaching you how to program synth patches by ear. Each lesson starts with a demonstration, then a interactive challenge with over 200 lessons. Once you complete the program, you’ll be able to create the sounds you hear using almost any synthesizer. Try the award-winning Syntorial today.

Now how about you? Can you use this in your music? And the answer is yes, but it kinda depends on what you want in your music. This thing is a great little glitchy kinda chiptune Lo-Fi synth. So if you don’t have something like that, and you want that in you music, this thing is great because not only are you getting a synth for your kid, for him to learn, you’re also getting this particularly unique sound to put into your music.

It also has a really unique interphase cause it was designed to kind of look like a toy and not like a typical synth and I find that inspiring. Just kind of learning this thing and messing around with it was just really fun. Now, you’re probably wondering, well if I need to use this in my music. I need to go to control with notes it’s playing, right? I don’t wanna just use the built in sequencer. And so we can do is turn it off, connect your MIDI controller too, which I have done here and I can play it.

So it’s just got a MIDI import here on the back. And you can just do any kind of MIDI output into it and… now you can control what notes it’s playing. And this randomize button’s great. It’s almost like dialing through presets. And of course, I can program my patch myself. Now, the drums we can also edit and play those. Right now my controller is sending MIDI info out on channel one, I’m gonna change it to channel two and now.

My keyboards playing the drums. And if I select these two buttons, I can change the sound of the drums. So, this right here becomes kind of the length of the drum, the amp decay or release. And this is the pitch. Same for the snare over here. This is the length. And this is kind of like a filter.

So there you have it. Really great way for your kid to learn synths, get in there early, and a cool little kind of Lo-Fi chiptune synth for you. All right, that’s the Blipblox. Now, if you’ve got a synth you’d love to see me cover here in Synth Spotlight, please comment below. And don’t forget if you’ve got a patch you need help with, head on over to our forum and request help there. And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Synth Spotlight: Diva

Today we’re covering u-he’s Diva. More specifically, the fact that it that allows you to mix and match components however you damn well please.

Curious to see what classic synths each of Diva’s modules emulates? This here reddit thread answers that question for you, so I don’t have to. God, I love the internet.

Have any suggestions for future synths to spotlight? Drop a comment below!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to another edition of Synth Spotlight. Today, we’re gonna talk about Diva. What makes it different from other synths? What makes it awesome, why you should care.

In a nutshell, it’s an analog emulation, but it’s different from others for two reasons. Number one, the quality is hard to match, just listen to this default patch. So warm it’s just beautiful. You told me that was analog I’d believe you. But on top of that, to go along with this quality is this flexibility and semi-modularness, that’s really interesting.

This section up here, right now is emulating a Minimoog Model D. But you can swap up each component to emulate a different classic analog synths. So for example, DCO gives us a Juno-60 oscillator, but we’re still with our Minimoog ladder filter. So we can mix and match different components, we’ve got five different oscillators, five different filters, a few different envelopes. So you can get these almost like Frankenstein analog synths, or you can emulate in an analog synth specifically and accurately.

It’s kind of up to you. And on top of all that is this section down here that is more of a standard digital plugin kinda section. You got both legend LFOs, effects, this whole trimmers section which I’ll talk about. So it’s this combination of awesome analog sound with digital plugin flexibility. So let’s jump right in. I’m gonna hop over to the preset section, go to templates, and we can draw up a specific synth.

I’m gonna go back to the Minimoog, and here we are. Now, the Minimoog is known for a lot of things, but one thing that was great was its basses. So I’m gonna make a bass here. And one of the things that really gave its sound was its filter known as a ladder filter put down a bit Just a nice sounding warm filter. Let’s add a little bit of filter or envelope We’ll switch to mono Oh, beautiful. Emphasis is resonance and if you really wanna push the saturation, this filter, we have this feedback knob which drives it. Awesome sound.

Now here’s an example of mixing and matching over here in our envelope, attack, decay, sustain. No release by default, the hidden release stage is just instant. However, if you enable the release switch now it’s controlled by our decay knob. Let go and it releases at this decay rate. Let’s go faster. Okay, that’s fine, that’s the way the Moog was, so they’re doing an accurate emulation here.

But what if you want a full ADSR, let’s switch over to a different one ADSR. This is modeled after Roland Juno Synth. So here’s a great example, I want the Moog sound, but I hate the limitation of no release stage. Okay fine, switch, so now we have everything Moog except for our envelope. Another thing I love about the Moog is the wave forms can be morphed so, All right, still having to jump between square saw So like for example, I’ve got a saw square hybrid here. A

ll right, so now, because we’re using this type of oscillator, this Moog emulation, we get to have a bit of a waveform morphing feature. And then one more example of digital flexibility here, the Minimoog’s a monophonic synth, one note at a time, but this is a plugin, so let’s switch. Now it’s a polyphonic Minimoog. Mix and match. All right, let’s try another emulation.

  • This isn’t your ordinary synth tutorial, this is Syntorial, making programming synths easy, with videogame-like training, teaching you how to program synth patches by ear. Each lesson starts with a demonstration, then an interactive challenge with over 200 lessons. Once you complete the program, you’ll be able to create the sounds you hear using almost any synthesizer. Try the award-winning syntorial today.

Let’s hop over to the Juno 60. Okay, like the Moog, you could do various things with this synth, however, one thing that was great about this synth was these warm lush pads. We’ve got pulse width control over here, controlling the pulse width of this oscillator’s waveform, being modulated by an LFO, so we get this moving washy sound and it’s layered in with a saw. However, we have multiple types of saws here. This one’s particularly nice. So I’m gonna do a nice filter synth ’cause this filter is great.

Let’s go a little bit brighter. So we’ve switched over to a different synth to get a different sound, and it sounds excellent. Now, another advantage to this oscillator compared to the Moog is this second section here. In the Moog, it’s locked in, right? This mixer comes with this oscillator, but when we switch to any of these other ones, becomes its own separate section, so right now it’s a simple high pass filter.

It’s doing nothing. I could jump up to three, to cut off some lows or I could boost the lows. So we get a bit more bottom-end out of our sound, but what I really wanna do is switch this feedback option. This is the feedback knob from the Moog. So now we are stealing one specific feature from the Moog so that we can drive this filter. Nice extra saturated Juno filter.

Okay, now I wanna look at another one of their presets. This is Digi-Uhbie, so this is a kind of a hybrid one they’ve created. Over here, this digital oscillator is a Jupiter 8000 and over here is their own kind of unique filter. It’s a combination inspired by a couple of different Oberheim+ filters and one other filter. And so what is our sound right now? This is big. Huge washy unison sound. We get this from our supersaw over here.

So the Jupiter 8000 had this supersaw, which is essentially like a unison saw. I’m gonna set the mix to once, we’re only hearing this oscillator and this is kind of like sort of a unison detuner They may think, “Well, big deal, I can get unison detuner on most synths now.” But the thing about classic, the supersaw was the unisons back then weren’t perfect, and that sort of non uniformness of it gave you a fatter unison. So with our Jupiter, we’re getting this awesome big, supersaw sound.

Now, we could make this a more accurate emulation per se. Switch back to cascade. This is the filter we saw when we were messing with the Juno-60, Roland used the same filter in multiple synths. So this gives us a more true Jupiter sound, I guess you could say. But the Uhbie sounded pretty awesome. It’s an aggressive filter. It’s really cool, so look, we’ve now, we’ve created a unique analog sound, one that you can’t get with any specific synth, only in Diva can you get this combination.

To go along with the supersaw as well, we’ve got some pretty unique waveforms over here, some noise And you can kinda morph them, down here, I like this, it’s kind of a sine saw. Oops sorry wrong knob, this one. Right, we can mix in a sine wave. Give us a nice fat saw, but for me it’s all about this supersaw, that’s why I love this oscillator.

Now, if you wanna learn exactly what each of these oscillators is emulating, which synths they’re modeling after in each of these filters, there’s a link below in the description, it’ll take you to a Reddit post where someone went through each one in detail and talked about what it’s emulating. And one thing you can do is you can kinda go and learn about each of those synths, learn about what they are great for, people really loved them for. They’ll help you give you an idea of what kind of sounds Diva can be great for.

Now, before we finish up, I just wanna hop down here and talk about a few features in this digital section. In our Effects section, got a pretty standard selection. I kind of like in the chorus, you have few different types. In particular, this ensemble ones, so check that out. In our delay, there’s this wow knob, which is basically, it makes it kind of wobble.

The pitch wobbles a little bit, giving us a tape echo, that old school kinda analog delay synth. Another nice little analog touch, which you can dial it in, how analog do I want it? Do I want just a little bit of that perfect digital or some heavy tape delay?

And then one other kind of unique one, rotary, this emulates a Leslie cabinet, which you’re usually paired with Hammond Organs. And the ModWheel as you turn it up will make it go fast. You don’t often see this kind of effect in a synth so I just thought I’d point it out. Now, another interesting aspect of digital flexibility applied to analog synth is this section here, is trimmers.

This allows us to kinda put into some randomness some variants in our sound. Classic analog synths they weren’t perfect, it’s just the nature of the beast back then. So things like pitch drift, where the pitch wasn’t always the same, kind of like bend a little bit here and there, or just any element of it not being absolutely perfect was part of the analog sound. This allows you to actually control that. In particular, this oscillator voice detune section is interesting. So let me step away from it for a second. Let me go up to the Moog. Crank all three oscillators. I can detune them here.

All right, we got a nice detuned sound However, I have another option. I can do it down here, but this time I can do it differently for each voice. So I hit a key and it will be controlled by these knobs. I hit a key again and now the voice detune is controlled by these knobs.

So for example, this is oscillator one, I’m gonna leave it there. I’m gonna detune oscillator two up a bit, oscillator three down a bit. I’ll leave this one the same. In fact, I’ll do it extremes, so you can hear the difference. Now watch the light. No, detune. Heavy detune. Now that’s weird and extreme, so let’s do something a little bit more, subtly different. so that’s something someone might not even notice, but as I’m playing, it’s gonna just vary a little bit from note to note. So we’re adding this sort of randomness in there, again, making it less and less perfect, but in a very intentional way.

One more feature, accuracy. So U-he Diva is very computer hungry. The reason it’s so great is because it uses lot of your computer power. And they’re very transparent about this, they tell you that right out front. They also give you the ability to dial it back though, by that divine, that’s the best possible quality. But if you’ve run into issues where it’s just pushing your computer too hard, you can dial it back as far as you need to.

And you can use your ear too, some patches you won’t hear as much of a difference, other patches you will. So as you’re changing settings, just listen, how does the sound change? That’s just a great trade off, so you can get the diva sound regardless of the power of your computer.

And lastly, check out the user manual, in particular it’s a good user manual. It’s written, written really well, easy to follow, understand, there’s like tutorials in there kinda and even patch recipes and stuff like that, its a excellent user manual. Right, if there’s any other questions you have that I haven’t talked about, comment below, happily answer.

You can also hop over to our forum and start a full on conversation. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, like to post videos like this every week or two, whether it’s about a specific synth or a specific little synth quickies in which I show you how to program different types of patches and things like that.

Synth Spotlight: Spire

You know how you’re always emailing me about making videos covering specific synth models and I’m always like “yeah, maybe later” or “that’s not a synth, that’s a calculator sir”?

Well those days are over: here is the first ever video in our new Synth Spotlight series where we will -you guessed it- spotlight synths! Again with the creative naming here.

First up: Spire. We’ll be covering:

  • Wavetable integration
  • HardFM
  • Super Saw unison
  • Analog/Digital/Hybrid Filters
  • Shaper Filter
  • Roland-style Chorus
  • X-Comp
  • EQ Character
  • Envelope Slope Time/Level
  • LFO Waveform Morphing
  • Weird LFO shapes
  • Stepper

If you have any questions or if you want to join the discussion, head on over to our forum, just please stop it with the calculator requests. I beg you.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

All right, welcome to the first “Synth Spotlight.” In this video, we’re gonna talk about Spire and specifically, we’re gonna talk about how this synth is different from others. Why you might pick this synth over another. That’s the whole point of this “Synth Spotlight” series.

There’s tons of synths out there now, which is a great thing, but they- most at least share the same core parameters. Can make the same core sounds. We talk about those parameters in Syntorial. That’s why Syntorial works, `cause you can take what you learn there and apply it to lots of different synths but, that’s also what makes it very hard for you to pick a synth. If they all can do the same core things and they all share so many features, why should you care about one synth over another? That’s what this “Spotlight” series is all about.

Now, I’m just gonna cover specific things I like about the synth. Things that kinda stand out to me. But, if you wanna discuss more about the synth, you have more questions, requests that I cover more parameters in another video, just in the description of the video you’ll see a link to our forum. There’s a topic there I’ve started for this synth. Ask whatever questions you want and either I or other users will get back to you and help you out navigating Spire.

Now, at the time of the making of this video this is version 1.1.14 and overall, the biggest differentiating theme of this synth is that, yes, it’s a very modern sounding synth. But it has all these analog emulation elements in it that you can incorporate in it. You’re gonna see it time and time again as I walk through some of these features and it’s a really cool concept. So first, let’s start with our oscillators.

Now, you’ve got a lot of different options here. Classic, which gives you saw or square, you have a noise, FM, sync. You can even create kind of vowelish sounds like a formant filter. But then, along with all of these which kind of changed what happens right here in the middle of our oscillator, you have this additional set of waveforms and the ability to kind of mix them into your main oscillator type up here creating a basically, a wavetable option to go along with all of your different options up here.

So let me, let me show you an example here with this classic. With classic, we can choose between a saw or a square. We can even pick a hybrid between which is nice. I like a saw square. Meanwhile, down here, we have a different choice. We can, for example, choose sine wave and we can mix that in instead. We go full sine and if we want. So you essentially create a wave table that is morphing between whatever you choose down here and whatever’s going on up here. So it takes each of these oscillator types and multiplies what you can do with them. It’s a really interesting approach this sort of wavetable plus a design structure.

Specifically of all these options, I really love hard FM. It’s this really interesting approach to FM. Before we can explain how that works and why it’s beneficial, let’s first look at FM. So, if you’re not familiar with FM, it’s where one oscillator modulates another oscillator and you usually get these kinds of metallic string-like tones. So by default, what we have is whatever is selected down here, modulates a sine wave and this is the amount of modulation.

We have a basic sine wave now, but as you turn this up we get that metallic tone. Then over here, this sets the pitch of one of the oscillators. Shows us how high or low that FM sound is. That’s FM. This is very straightforward. It’s a nice, simple approach and I like it. It’s easy to use. However, FM has one downside and that is the pitch of your overall sound can change. Right now am playing in G. It does not sound like a G anymore. Almost sounds out of tune. If you wanna mix in this waveform, it’s really out of tune because this is actually controlling the pitch of this one, the modulator. That’s just the downside of FM. You can run into pitch issues. So they invented HardFM.

So, HardFM is a little bit different. It essentially takes whatever way from what you have chosen here and it modulates itself. So this again by default, is a sine wave modulating a sine wave and on the surface, it sounds similar. Okay, great. So what’s the difference? The difference is over here, in the pitch. It’s gonna jump between pitch settings, frequency settings, and it strives to always say in tune till we removed that pitchy issue. You hear it snap? It’s really cool. So it’s a FM, but it makes it way easier to stay in tune and as sort of an extra side bonus. This, instead of mixing in one of the sine waves, this will mix in the next waveform on the list One octave below totally unaffected by FM. So it’s like a sub oscillator.

So here comes a triangle. One octave below For just an extra dimension. So now this sort of becomes this wave table mix. Now becomes a sub oscillator volume knob. You can do this for any sound So for example, This is a violin, when it gets a real raw FM and then mix in the next violin two, right? Violin two an octave below it All right. Hard FM.

Next I’m gonna jump over to our unison section. So by default, it’s pretty straight forward. You pick the number of voices and then you can detune. You can mess around with how the voices are spread out. You create chords and stuff like that but what I really like about this is this density knob Essentially, density changes the sort of spread of all the different voices, it makes them less uniform. It just changes the pattern a little bit. The description isn’t very specific. I don’t know exactly what’s going on but you can hear the nature of the unison change as you increase it

Specifically, they say in the manual that if you crank density, what you get is an emulation of super saw from Roland JP-8000. It’s a classic analog synth that was kind of known for this specific saw unison. It’s just a real lush, thick unison. Compare it to density up here, which they describe the sort of seven voice middle density as a hypersaw, which is a well known saw from the Virus TI a famous digital synth. Just compare. This is a little more cleaner and precise versus it’s just more going on there. It’s lusher, it’s thicker. You can really hear it with nine voices. This is the first example of being able to kind of dial in an analogish emulation into this otherwise very modern digital synth

Alright, next. Let’s hop over to our filter. So, this is yet another example of the sort of analog digital hybrid approach. This isn’t your ordinary synth tutorial.

This is Syntorial. Making programming synths easy with video game like training teaching you how to program synth patches by ear. Each lesson starts with a demonstration, then an interactive challenge with over 200 lessons. Once you complete the program, you’ll be able to create the sounds you hear using almost any synthesizer. Try the award winning Syntorial today.

We’ve had a lot of different filter types here. Let’s take a look at Acido. This is an emulation of the TB-303. Another classic analog synth bass synthesizer and our envelope is much like our cutoff, by the way. We’ve got different slopes for our low pass. This is like a 24 dB, this is like a 6dB Alright, so there’s an option. There’s an analog style filter Or we can go Infecto, which is like an imitation of the Virus Ti. So this is a digital approach. This is our low pass, this is a 12 dB slope bandpass, high Pass, Notch.

All right, great! so we got an analog option, we got a digital option. But then, since they can do this they created two hybrid filters. This is perfecto, this essentially inside the algorithm is taking elements of a digital filter and elements of an analog emulation and combining them. we got a 24 dB low pass, bandpass, High pass and a peak and they did the same thing with this Scorpio. This again is an analog digital hybrid with various types of low pass and then a high pass, a bandpass. So, you have options here. If you know you want a low pass, high pass or bandpass, try these different things out. Do you want an analog approach? Digital approach? Do you want something in between?

Nice options, what I also like about this filter is they have this one option, Shaper. This combines like a distortion wave shaper with a low pass/high pass filter. So our resonance, we turn off envelope. Our resonance becomes our basically, our distortion amount and saturates a very kind of warm distortion. You can dial in how much of that distortion you want and then you can use cut off. If you lower it, it’s a low pass. Raise it – a high pass. Noon is no filtering.

Alright, so here’s a nice warm kind of style saturation. You can incorporate in your sound or you can go more of like an aggressive digital. It almost kind of starts to sound a little bit crushy at points. and then we can… Very nice, cool little touch to have in the filter. Since there’s two filters here, this is more like an effect. You run through this first one, you can then set your second filter as like a regular low pass-high Pass bandpass. If you want that actual regular filter to come after the shaper. Cause by default, filter one runs into filter two. All right, that’s our filter.

Next, let’s hop over to our effects. So you got yet another wave shaper, but here’s a ton of options. So this is like a more detailed wave shaper. Phaser, got delay, reverb good, just good solid effects with lots of parameters. What I wanna talk about is the Chorus `cause here’s yet another example of incorporating an analog element into the synth.

It’s got a lot of modes and by default J8 is selected, which is JP 8000. Again, this classic Roland synth. One of the things it`s known for is having this wonderful chorus. It’s kind of like the chorus that other choruses try to emulate. What I love about this is you don’t have to set anything. If you just want this classic lush chorus, just increase your dry wet. Ah! So nice. But again, maybe you wanna kind of start to move over into the digital realm.

All right, so it’s a cleaner, more precise chorus We get thinner and thinner. So eventually, with one we have more of a flanger. Increase your full back, turn on your delay and then you can get this. Real flangery sound. So I love their approach to chorus.

Next effect I want to talk about is this X-Comp. This is a multi-band upward downward compressor and if you’re not familiar with that, usually they’re way more complex. There’s a lot of different parameters. This is literally just one knob. Everything else is set internally for you. It’s kinda like a secret sauce of this synth You turn it up a little bit and it instantly makes your sound more kind of upfront louder and aggressive. Just that like sort of It’s a real sort of typical kind of compressor result that you want.

All you need to do is turn up one knob and on a plain saw it’s not so obvious. So let me show you on a couple presets. See here we go without it with it. Ah! It`s kind of in your face now. Ah! It’s just instant oomph. Let’s look at the next preset this one doesn’t have it on it. Now with it. Ah! if you want your sound louder, more aggressive, just dial up this knob If you go really far with it it squeezes the life out of it, which is kind of a cool effect in itself.

Typically, you wanna keep it right around here. All right, and last in the effects is this EQ. Now, for the most part, it’s just sort of a boring simple EQ. It’s there for you to use. No need making EQ complex. It is what it should be. You got a shelf, peak and shelf. However, it has these character presets up here. So here’s a plain saw You can boost it, That just makes it louder pretty much. You can also make it warmer. Listen to the low end the body of the sound. Kinda thin.

There’s another example, of like bringing this almost kind of analogueish sort of warm characteristic into the sound. Then you also have the soft option which just takes a little bit of the highs off Again, that can kind of get rid of some of that sort of precise high digital sharpness. Very nice. Okay, that’s our effects.

Let’s move on to some modulation sources. Let’s talk about our filter. Oh, excuse me. Our envelope and you’ve got four envelopes. One, two, three and four. Three is set to cut off by default. So let’s enable it. We got a decay going down to a sustain So, it looks like an ADSR at first attack, decay, sustain, release but there’s two parameters in between. This is slope time and slope level. It’s really like a second decay and sustain.

Let me give an example. You know, oftentimes an envelope with the decay sustain part, you usually use it for one of two things You either can create an attack transient like this. Right, so I’m shooting my cutoff down really fast increase this DEOW attach transient or you can create kind of a longer fade like this. But what if you want both? what if you want a little transient followed by a fade? That’s where this second set comes in. So I bring my sustain at about, let’s say, halfway, I create a little transient Great, there’s my transient I leave my slope level all the way down and I increase my slope time. Now watch what happens. It completes this first decay/sustain for my transient and then it goes into this second decay/sustain All right, so just you know, it’s a simple ADSR plus two additional settings making it just a little bit more of a complex envelope, ADSDSR.

All right, next, let’s talk LFO. We have four LFOs as well. One, two, three and four. Let’s route this to cut off and what I like about this is how they handle wave forms. So by default, it’s a sine wave. But you can morph between a sine wave and a triangle or a square. So first off, you know, sometimes people ask what’s the difference between a sine and a triangle when it comes to LFO? Sounds about the same.

The difference is what happens the top and the bottom. So sine wave kind of curves more softly So the sound kind of hangs out at the top and the bottom a little bit longer Triangle just hits a point immediately turns around So just listen to the top and bottom. See how abrupt that is? but this allows you to get best of both worlds.

All right. So it lets you really dial in exactly how long you want this to hang out at the top and the bottom Or maybe you like square You want the jump, but it’s too jumpy Dial it back. Then we can determine where it starts in this waveform right. So now, every time we hit a note it starts right at the top or right at the bottom of say.

So thats kind of a nice core use of this LFOcause really this sort of sine, triangle or square. Those are some pretty common shapes for it. However, if you wanna get a little weird, if you wanna experiment with shapes, we’ve got a whole huge amount of options down here . It`s very similar to our waveform options over here. So I’ll just pick a random one, let’s do vocal. So you can just get some really bizarre shapes and you can morph these as well. Could be really nice for let’s say, like a pad where you want some sort of irregular just sort of movement in it. That doesn’t sound like it’s such a pattern the way a square or sine is so obviously a pattern. Alright, that’s our LFO.

One more feature. I’d like to talk about and that is our stepper. The stepper is, it’s kind of like an LFO by default, right? So in order to route it, you go into matrix. You select stepper, which is off screen. Stepper one and I’m gonna set it to cut off. I need to disable envelope, okay, and increase our amount. So just executing into this little light. It’s executing one saw at a time and I can reduce it. So now, it’s just gonna use the first four. One , two, three, four. One , two, three, four. So right now it’s like a saw LFO. It`s just repeating saw over and over again that I can change each one.

So I could say go in here and drag this shape down or I could select a different one and it’s got some kind of presets like this. Or I can create multiple repeats within one little column so, Right, so you can create these really complex sequence of modulation shapes.

Let me show you some examples here. This is that kind of classic dubstep wub but it’s complex instead of being you know, repeating shape from an LFO, it’s changing as it goes along. That’s kind of a real fun use of the stepper but you can also do more simple things with it. Like for example, this guy. This is just routed to our oscillator two’s volume I’m gonna turn oscillator one and three off Just oscillator two and it doesn’t retrigger. That’s what these buttons are about.

Just goes through it one time So it’s basically like an envelope, right, it just kind of really fast attack and then it kind of had two decay stages But unlike the envelope, you can really mess with the shape of each column of each stage So it turns into a really precise envelope. T

hat’s one of the reasons I love this. Yes, you can do these long, complex sequences. But you can also treat it like a customizable LFO or a customizable envelope. It’s just sort of a really, limitless modulation source.

All right, that’s my take on Spire Those are some of the really the coolest features from Spire again, if you have any questions, you want me to cover more parameters, you just want to talk about the synth in general, just check out the description below for the link to the article.