It’s been a decade already since Massive was released. With barely any upgrades, you could be forgiven for thinking it was forgotten. Now, with the major overhaul of Native Instruments, we have something exciting to grasp

With very little to go by from the promo video, I managed to grab this screenshot. This is really all we have at the moment, but let’s break it down…

From the very start, we can see that Massive X has a totally redesigned interface, looking more like the Reaktor products such as Razor than the original Massive. It is also a lot brighter in colour – a more modern look, and so we can assume that this new synth has some modernised features under the hood too.

Claiming a “next generation sound engine, state of the art components, and new effects” there is a lot to be excited about, after all, the current Massive practically defined the dubstep era, as well as many other late noughties/early teenies genres.

One big thing that we see from the image is that there seems to be wavetable visualisations now, something that Massive was severely lacking in, to the point that Serum was able to steal the gaze of most wavetable synthesis users in the past few years. The word online is that this may be a modular synth, which could make Massive X ground-breaking. A more refined version of Reaktor’s Blocks, all packaged in the one synth could make this a formidable selling point.

From extreme zooming in, it looks like brand new wavetables too, the one shown looks like it is called “gorilla” and if I’m right, actually comes with a gorilla logo next to it. This does lead to the question of whether Massive X is going to allow users to load in their own wavetables because this is near enough standard these days. If not, it would be a severe short-sightedness of Native Instruments, and we can only hope there would be a good reason for it.

In terms of modulation, it looks like there are four envelopes, as well as LFOs, and steppers, this seems to be very similar to the original Massive, though it would make sense that they have been thoroughly updated. The envelope in view does look like it offers more control and so that is a relief to see, especially with what looks like slope controls.

The top and bottom caught my eye, where it looks like there are Macros along the top – lots of them, and the ability to load different parts along the bottom. I imagine this is for much tighter integration with NI’s Komplete Kontrol Keyboards, where perhaps different presets can be mapped to different octaves/channels.

This would make sense for Native Instruments as their direction has always had a push on their native hardware.

The official line is that it will be released in February 2019, and will be included in Komplete 12. We can hardly wait!

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