JOSH FIELSTRA: Hi. I’m Josh Fielstra, product specialist with Native Instruments, and I’m here showing off some of the new plugins we’ve just released. On October 13th, we announced four new instruments as well as a new piece of hardware, and I have one of the new instruments here up in front of me.

This is Massive. This is a totally new instrument for us, and the basic idea with massive is we’ve done some modeling of real-world phenomenon in products like Guitar Rig 2 for instance. We’ve done kind of meticulous modeling of amps and cabinets, and with Massive we’ve set our sights on the quirks of analog circuitry. For instance, we’ve done a lot of that same detailed modeling with filters, analog filters, but specifically filters that focus on a very dirty, aggressive, nasty kind of analog sort of sound.

I have within Massive 11 different filter types with names like Scream and Daft, designed for kind of meaty self-oscillation, very aggressive sound. I actually have the Daft filter loaded on this particular preset here.

[JOSH FIELSTRA PLAYING WITH NATIVE INSTRUMENTS MASSIVE]

You can hear kind of that squelchy, squeaky sound that’s going on there. That’s no accident. Also, before it hits the filter section, I have Massive’s main sound generating source, which is 82 different wavetables, and actually I can have up to 128 different waveforms inside each wavetable, but once again specifically designed for a very aggressive sound. I have wavetables with sound -- with names like Vulgar, Disto, Crusher, Strontium, so on and so forth, designed to give you kind of an angry, nasty sound. And I’ll be playing a few of those sounds in just a moment. In fact, here’s a good way to show you how to get to a sound. Directly integrated inside Massive as is the case with all of our new synths, we’re actually putting a sort of integrated Kore browser right in here. If you’re familiar with our product Kore, Kore allows you to browse sounds by category or directly by preset name to find exactly the sound you’re looking for quickly, so I’ll look for a sound inside Massive that’s a bass, distorted, and fat, which is a lot of the sounds inside Massive give you that exact effect.

So, I’m going to take the patch, [PH] Bronner 2 Bass Line, and...

[JOSH FIELSTRA PLAYING WITH NATIVE INSTRUMENTS MASSIVE]

...that’s a little bit of a sequence attached to it. And also with inside Massive, I have this macro control section down here, and these are eight knobs that I can assign to whatever I want inside Massive, any of Massive’s parameters, and then tweak them in real time, and that’s what I’m going to do with my MIDI controller, and then you can get kind of an idea of the sounds that Massive is capable of here.

[JOSH FIELSTRA PLAYING WITH NATIVE INSTRUMENTS MASSIVE]

So kind of cool. A word about how these assignments are actually made, I can take any of these knobs down in a section here and actually just freely drop them on any of Massive’s parameters. I’m going to take this knob, drop it there, and then I’m going to give it an amount. That’s how all the modulations are done.

Here I’ve got an envelope. I can do the exact same thing. I’m going to take this envelope and then I’m going to drop it on the intensity parameter inside my oscillator section, and then I’m going to specify an amount. So, this is how you can tell how any of the parameters in Massive are currently assigned as far as modulations. Look at the cutoff knob. I’ve got three different things assigned to it. I’ve got a green number 7, which I know is coming from this little step sequencer, a 3 which I know is coming from the third knob, and a green 6 which I know is coming from this other step sequencer. So, I can look at any of the controls and immediately know what’s being modulated and how much and from where, which is definitely one of the ease of use things we wanted to make possible inside Massive, so it’s actually really easy to do things like modulations.

Let’s find another sound that uses this to good example. I know what this is called so I’m actually just going to type a few letters with the name of the preset, and here it is. It’s called Under Wonder.

[JOSH FIELSTRA PLAYING WITH NATIVE INSTRUMENTS MASSIVE]

I wasn’t kidding when I said it was designed to get pretty serious aggressive sounds, so that’s kind of Massive in a nutshell, and this currently, as I said, it was released on October 13, so feel free to check it out.