Can i use massive with fl studio

The engine features an impressive amount of waveforms, filters and modulators, encompassing various forms of sound design, with a gorgeous, intuitive interface. In my opinion, the breadth of creative scope and versatility of this incredible plugin make it one of the most powerful soft synthesizers of all time. Oscillators essentially play waves or wavetables small waveform patterns such as sine or square waves at a very high rate which produces a sound output.

Wavetable synthesizers are built around this concept, and the oscillators will be the starting point of any sound you create with Massive. Massive has 3 main, independent oscillators, each of which is more or less identical.

Each oscillator can be turned on or off using the small circular button to the left of the OSC heading text.

To browse the available wavetables for a given oscillator, click the drop-down menu to the right of the OSC text. This will bring up an eclectic selection of wavetables such as simple square-saw waves, to weirder examples such as modern talking and carbon. Have a browse through these wavetables, as they will be the foundation of your sound. The pitch of the oscillator can be edited by dragging the pitch value within the oscillator module.

A common concept of multi-oscillator sound creation is to give a slightly different pitch value to each oscillator e.

Something that makes wavetable synthesis particularly powerful is the use of wavetable positioning. Massive allows you to choose where you are positioned on a specific wavetable. For example, in the default square-saw wave, turning the WT-position knob will scroll between a square wave full left rotation and a saw wave full right rotation.

Think of it as scrolling through a 3D model of a wavetable. All the wavetable options in Massive work this way, and some have very bizarre, revolving effects when using the WT-position knob. The intensity knob in the oscillator section basically does what it says on the tin. This control is actually dependent on the drop down menu directly above it. If Spectrum is selected for example, the intensity knob will remove higher harmonics, similar to a low-pass filter.

There are a few other cool bend and formant options here to warp your sounds in various ways. This feature becomes particularly useful when you start to involve modulation connections within Massive, which we will cover later in this guide.

This slider down the right side of the oscillator module controls the routing amount to the two built-in filters directly to the right of oscillator 1 and 2.

This section has the modulation options: ring modulation, phase, position and filter FM. Each of these options can be assigned to a different oscillator, and each one can produce some interesting, highly creative modulation effects.

To add one of these modulation options to an oscillator, use the buttons at the right of the module. In this example, the ring mod is applied to oscillator 1, the phase mod is applied to oscillator 3, the position mod is applied to oscillator 2 and the filter FM is turned off.

Ring Mod: When the ring mod is applied to a specific oscillator, it creates a kind-of rapid tremolo effect. For the ring mod option, the pitch knob alters the speed of the tremolo, therefore completely transforming the character of the sound. The RM value determines the amount of ring mod that affects the sound. Phase: This control adds a vibrato effect to a selected oscillator.

The pitch knob alters the speed of the vibrato, while the phase knob alters the depth. Position: This modulates the wavetable positioning of the oscillator. The pitch knob alters the position modulation speed, and the position knob alters how much the position modulates by. This should make more sense once we take a look at the filter module later in this guide.

So this module essentially gives a quick, intuitive way of adding modulation effects to oscillators. Adding noise in Massive is a great way to apply texture and sonic flourishes to your sound. Massive has a modest selection of noise samples to choose from, such as white noise, tape hiss, paper and water pipes. The colour knob is dependent on the chosen noise sample, but generally speaking increasing the colour value makes the noise brighter and less filtered.

There is also a filter slider in the noise module, meaning your chosen noise can be independently routed to the filter sections in the same way as the main oscillators.

Using the feedback module, you can take a portion of the sound and feed it back into itself, creating some very interesting distorted sounds.

There are a few buttons labelled FB within this section that determine this shown below. Essentially, whichever FB feedback button is highlighted, Massive will feed your sound back into itself from this point in the sounds routing.

For example, if you highlight the far right FB option, you are routing the entire sound back into itself. This controls the amount of feedback the sound creates. When used heavily, this module can sound pretty terrible. However when you introduce modulation and other elements which we will covered later , you can create some very unique, creative distortion effects.

So that covers the left hand column of Massive, the majority of which focuses on both independent and dependent oscillators.

As always, you should definitely get to grips with these modules before moving on to the rest of the Massive interface. Now you have your oscillators down, you can move on to Massive various modules for manipulating your sound further. Like with all filter effects or plugins, filters adjust and warp your existing audio frequency, they do NOT create new frequencies. Massive has a fairly standard selection of low-passes, high-passes, an all-pass and a band-pass option. On top of this, there is a selection of filter types associated with Massive such as scream or daft.

In these sections, you have a Cutoff and a Resonance option. For example: the cutoff knob for low-pass will work completely different to the cutoff knob for the acid filter. But remember you are altering the frequency of your existing sound, not adding new sonic elements.

Going back to something I mentioned in the Modulation Oscillator section of this guide, the Filter FM option in the Modulation Oscillator section modulates the Cutoff value in the filter section. This is very simple, intuitive way of modulating phase on the cutoff value of the filter. Note: this works for most filter types but not all! One thing that is worth mentioning here is that for certain filter types, the middle knob becomes available to adjust. Like the oscillator modules, each filter has a slider on the right hand side to control the level of the filter.

Effects within Massive can be categorized into two main modules: the insert effects modules and the master effect module. The insert effects module can be inserted into various points in the audio routing tab. You can determine where the effects are inserted in a similar way to the feedback module. Open the routing tab, and light up the button Ins 1 or Ins 2 wherever you want to insert your effect.

For example, placing the effect just after the oscillators will add the chosen effect to the sound generated by the oscillators, and then any subsequent filters or master effects will be applied afterwards. The insert effect module has an eclectic range of effects such as a bitcrusher, a frequency shifter and a parabolic shaper. The other effect option in Massive is the master effect option. The main difference between this and the insert effect options is the master effects are applied to the entire sound.

The knobs in this module are dependent on the chosen effect, and each effect has a decent amount of customization options for tweaking and fine-tuning your sound. There is a third tab in this effect module dedicated to EQ, with low shelf, boost, frequency and high shelf parameters. For more in-depth ways to EQ your Massive sounds, check out our list of the best EQ plugins on the market. The rest of this guide will be focusing on the various modulation and other options within the red highlighted area above.

However, the most expansive creative possibilities come into play when you dive into the seemingly endless world of modulation options. Make sure you have the above sections down before you move onto modulation, otherwise things may start to get a little overwhelming.

If not, no worries. I will show you how to do that right now. Open up FL Studio. On the left side menu, right click on Plugin Database. Choose the option that says Manage Plugins. This will bring up the Plugin Manager Folder. This is where we tell FL Studio where to look for Massive. Click on the add folder icon on the plugin search path menu. This will bring up a folder selection window.

Look at the path that you jotted down in the first step. Navigate to this folder and then click okay. Scan the Plugins again Now click the Start Scan button. This will force FL Studio to look for new plugins. When it gets done running, you should see massive show up in the list on the right. Close the Plugin Manager window. Now click Installed. Then click Generators. FL Studio considers Massive to be a generator, because it creates sound. Things like reverb or delays would be located under the effects tab.

And then click VST.