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It's easy to coax great synth sounds out of Massive.

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Massive is a hybrid synth that combines ideas and influences from all over the place. What's more, it's one of the most feature-packed synths we've ever encountered.

In fact, it seems to be an attempt to present the sort of power and flexibility you'll find in the likes of Absynth and FM7, but with a more accessible interface and an altogether different engine.

Massive's main page is reassuringly simple, and most of the commonly used controls are right here ready and waiting for you to start tweaking. For the most part, the layout is very straightforward, with the left-hand strip of the GUI being home to the three oscillators and an extra modulation oscillator, as well as the noise and feedback controls.

Architecture

The oscillators are slightly unusual in that you can morph from one waveform to another via a dedicated knob (rather than them being a single, static shape).

The default wavetable oscillator shape is called Square-Saw I, so when the wavetable position knob is turned hard left, the oscillator emits a square wave. Gradually rotate the knob to the right, however, and it turns into a sawtooth.

You can choose from 82 wavetable oscillator shapes, ranging from simple waves to more sophisticated vocal effects and metallic noises. Each oscillator also features an Intensity control - akin to a low-pass filter - and a control for panning the output between Massive's two filters.

The filter section is located to the right of the oscillators and can be set to function in serial or parallel modes or in a mixture of both (via a crossfader). 11 filter modes are available; as well as the familiar two- and four-pole high- and low-pass filters, some more exotic ones can also be selected.

These include the chunky low-pass Daft (presumably a tribute to French filter-wranglers Daft Punk), Scream (an aggressive filter with a control for adjusting its distortion component), and a comb filter with feedback and damping controls.

Modulation

Despite being rather posh, neither the oscillators nor the filters represent Massive's most intriguing feature. That honour is reserved for the clever modulation system, which recalls one of our favourite synths of recent years, FabFilter Twin.

Rather than offering a complex, space-consuming modulation matrix, Massive has an elegant system that's not only quick and intuitive to use but also gives the user some helpful visual feedback.

The system works in a very simple way. Each of Massive's knobs has one or more Modulation Slots located underneath it, and each modulation source - envelopes, LFOs and the eight macro controls with MIDI learn - has a Modulation Handle that can be dragged and dropped into any of these slots.

The slot then becomes a control that enables you to dictate how much the modulation source affects the modulation destination - visual representation of this is given in a ring that surrounds the knob.