The foundational Massive bank. Editable, instructive, and wobblier than modern riddim wants.
The good
- Fully editable rather than baked into audio
- Macros mapped for immediate automation
- Excellent for learning genre sound design
The bad
- Requires the paid full version of Massive
- Dated wobble character
- Needs extra distortion for current styles
- Format
- NMSV presets
- Content
- Bass growls, leads, pads
- Requires
- NI Massive (full version)
- Tempo
- Any
- License
- Royalty-free
Why we rated it that way
Our rating, by criterion
- Editability 9.5
Macros mapped to wavetable and filter sensibly.
- Teaching value 9.5
Modulation routing is worth studying.
- Value 9.0
Nineteen dollars for editable sound design.
- Modern relevance 6.0
Wobblier and cleaner than current riddim.
Why we picked it
Best for Massive owners who want editable dubstep growls with sensible macro mappings and patches that teach the genre's modulation techniques.
Who should skip it
Avoid if you do not own the full version of Massive, or if you need current riddim aggression, because these patches sound like the era that created them.
This is the foundational Massive bank for the genre, and it remains the best place to start if you want to edit rather than load.
Presets beat loops for dubstep because the bass needs to follow the arrangement, and this bank understands that. The macros are mapped sensibly across the patches, so the first knob usually controls wavetable position and the second the filter, which means you can automate the growl to change across four bars without opening the modulation matrix. I took one patch, drew a macro automation lane over eight bars, and got a bass line that developed rather than repeated.
The sound design is instructive as well as usable. Opening the patches up and looking at how the LFOs are routed teaches more about dubstep bass than most tutorials, because you can see three modulators running at different rates and hear what each contributes when you disable it. For a producer trying to learn the genre rather than borrow it, that is worth more than the sounds themselves.
The friction is age. This bank established a lot of the vocabulary and consequently sounds like the era it came from, so the growls are wobblier and less distorted than current riddim expects.
It also requires the full version of Massive, not the free player, which is a genuine additional cost. At nineteen dollars it is cheap for what it teaches, and you should expect to push the distortion further than the presets do.