Few soft synths are as legendary as Massive. This is the history of Native Instruments’ evergreen wavetable instrument, from development and release to its recent rebirth as Massive X Player.
Massive. Has there ever been a better-named soft synth? Native Instruments’ bass monster arrived in late 2006, blowing the competition out of the water with its astonishing sound quality, novel use of wavetables, semi-modular structure, powerful modulation options and ease of use. It soon established itself as the instrument for electronic music producers, helping spawn not only dance music genres like dubstep but a glut of copycat wavetable synths of varying quality.
And, almost 20 years later, it remains a high-water mark for soft synths and a blueprint for what a dance music-focused plugin instrument should be. “Violinists have their Stradivarius, guitarists have their Strats, and producers have Massive,” said user reviewer FarleyCZ on KVR, echoing the thoughts of many, many musicians. Or, as producer Lawrence Hart said succinctly: “Massive does everything I want.”
It’s hard to believe that a piece of software two decades old could still be in such demand when the life-cycle for most is a few years at best. How did Massive come to dominate the music production landscape, and how is it able to maintain its position in a market saturated with similar instruments?
The story begins in Berlin in the mid-2000s with a man named Mike Daliot.
In the 2014 book Presets – Digital Shortcuts to Sound, Massive designer Mike Daliot described his creation as “bass in war mode.” Much like the monster getting away from Dr Frankenstein, Mike’s creation seems to have taken on a life of its own, with its sound inspiring countless records. “I’ve heard tracks where someone took a preset and just added a snare and some chords and that’s all they did,” he said in the book.
Mike, who had previously created the Reaktor instruments Carbon and Vierring, wanted to make a synthesizer capable of generating huge bass and lead sounds. While virtual analogue was still the most popular synthesis style at the time, Daliot turned instead to wavetables, a sample-based approach closely associated with 1980s hardware like the PPG Wave and Waldorf Microwave. However, he took things far beyond what these clunky older instruments were capable of, animating the playhead with modulation and adding an Intensity section to further alter the sound.
“The way Massive could manipulate wavetables in real time was unique for a VST at the time,” explained Frank Elting, Native Instruments' original Project Manager for Massive. “Mike favoured the perspective of a musician rather than that of an engineer, and this philosophy was reflected in the creation of the built-in wavetables.”
Another novel feature for Massive was its self-contained GUI, with most controls confined to a single screen. “Mike and the team designed a remarkably effective single-view interface, which was just as important as the sound in driving Massive’s success,” said Frank. “That simplicity helped make it accessible, especially for young producers starting out. In fact, the single-view layout became so influential that it was later adopted by many other synthesizers.”
"The initial reaction wasn’t as overwhelming as Massive’s long-term success might suggest"
While it may sound surprising today, sales of Massive were slow at first. This was due to the team’s decision to prioritize sound quality over CPU efficiency. “The initial reaction wasn’t as overwhelming as Massive’s long-term success might suggest,” said Frank. “At launch, Massive was very demanding on CPUs, and it took time for producers to fully appreciate its sound quality and usability.”
Rather than immediate adoption, the music producers gradually found their way to the instrument as processing power improved. “As computers became more powerful, Massive gained wider recognition and ultimately established itself as a genre-defining instrument,” said Frank.
Although slow out of the gate, Massive soon became the instrument that everyone wanted. Much of this came through word of mouth, with producers hyping the synth’s power and sound quality to each other. “I was having a conversation with someone, I think it might have been George Fitzgerald, and I was talking about how certain people get certain sounds and he was like, oh, that's just Massive,” said Lawrence.
Reviews of the time praised it for its astonishing depth of sound, which was achieved by employing high sample rates not only in sound generation, but for modulation, another area where the instrument broke new ground. Drag-and-drop modulation assignment, as well as the sheer variety of modulation possibilities, played a big part in the wildness of the sounds that you could make with it, controlling not only filters and amplitude but the wavetables themselves.
"It's rare I ever use an analogue synth for bass these days"
Native Instruments designed Massive for bass duties, and that’s exactly how most people used it, cranking out earth-quaking bass and ever-more wild wobbles. Arriving just when a new generation of producers was coming online, it became the instrument to have, and was soon popping up in tracks across genres, from the deepest underground dubstep to the chart-topping EDM.
Producer Lawrence Hart, who crafts gorgeously melodic, UK garage-inflected tracks, may have a studio full of analogue synths from Moog and Roland, but when it comes to bass, his go-to is Massive. “I use the Moog One quite a lot for pads and poly synth parts but generally for Massive, I just use that for basses,” the artist, whose new mixtape Asking For A Friend is out on November 14, said. “It's rare I ever use an analogue synth for bass these days.”
Continuing, he added: “I used to use the SH-101 quite a bit for bass and the Moog Subsequent 32 and different things like that, and I just found that the subs were so much more consistent on Massive. I was listening to other people's records and thinking, I want my bass lines to hit like that. And as soon as I started using Massive, I was like: 'oh, this is the sound I've been wanting.'”
![Lawrence Hart [Domino Records] builds a track from scratch – In The Studio - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/VttEfbrzWDw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Lawrence’s experience is probably like many musicians, who found that Massive gave them consistent power in the low end. “With Massive, you can have three oscillators on top of each other, slightly detuned, and that should be out of control (with) phase cancellation, but with Massive you still seem to be able to have quite a consistent sub with that.”
“I assume Lawrence is referring to the Restart Via Gate option on the oscillator page, which ensures a consistent and reproducible phase relationship between the oscillators for each note,” answered Frank Elting when asked about why this might be the case. “The setting is another example of Mike’s attention to detail and experience as a sound designer. It makes a noticeable difference if you’re aiming for a stable, predictable sound.”
Lawrence also likes how the LFOs are easy to use. “The fact that you can map LFOs to pretty much anything in there means quite quickly you can get these evolving sounds,” he said. “I make a lot of bassline-influenced music with wobbly rhythmic basses. Massive is great for that because you can put a synced LFO on an out-of-time LFO. You can have your LFO start to slow down or whatever it might be, and that's architecture that you don't really have on much else, really.”
"I think there's a warmth to it that I don't hear as much in [other wavetable synths like Serum]"
Although Massive is a wavetable synth, Lawrence finds that it sounds very ‘analogue’ in a way that appeals to his love for hardware synthesizers. “I think there's a warmth to it that I don't hear as much in [other wavetable synths like Serum],” he said. “They sound very modern and very cutting but there's still this analogue sound to Massive.”
When asked about this, Frank answered, “I don’t think making Massive sound analogue was an explicit goal. The ‘analogue’ association, in my opinion, comes from the unison features, the musical modulation system, and the multiple drive stages. These aren’t necessarily modelled after analogue gear, but they contribute to an analogue-like sonic character. Interestingly, the first version didn’t even include virtual analogue oscillator modes.”
Twenty years is a long time. For music production software, it’s an eternity, so it was inevitable that something else would come along to challenge Massive’s bass hegemony. That something arrived in 2014 with the name Serum, another wavetable synthesizer with a single-screen UI and similar feature set. As Lawrence mentioned, Serum (and other modern wavetable challengers) tend to have a cleaner sound than Massive, one that found favour with modern dance music producers.
“Native Instruments’ Massive might have been the synth that made wavetable synthesis the de facto approach for modern electronic music, but Steve Duda’s Serum took Massive’s blueprint and ran with it, becoming the go-to for producers of EDM and bass music,” Ben Rogerson said in MusicRadar’s guide to the best synth plugins.
Native Instruments’ groundbreaking instrument faced further competition from Arturia’s Pigments, which borrowed Massive’s influential modulation animations while adding additional synthesis engines, something that Serum has also done in its second iteration. Released in 2019, Kilohearts’ Phase Plant also built on Massive’s semi-modular architecture, an instrument that confidently handles Massive-style bass sounds while providing a broader array of synthesis options.
In 2019, Native Instrument released Massive’s successor Massive X. While a solid instrument with even-better sound quality, flexible routing, new oscillator modes and an advanced modulation system, it failed to make the same kind of impression on the public as its predecessor.
Unlike the recently released Serum 2, which is an upgrade rather than a sequel, Native Instruments released Massive X as a follow-up, effectively trying to capture lightning in a bottle a second time. It didn’t. In our 2019 review, MusicRadar called it “a hugely characterful, immensely powerful synth with a number of issues, some of which feel like the result of a rushed release.” Some of the issues mentioned include one less oscillator and the baffling disappearance of modulation animation, something now de rigueur in most modern soft synths.
To be fair, the antipathy directed at X does feel unwarranted. It’s an excellent instrument in its own right. You can’t help but feel that if Massive X had been released under a different name – something not saddled with all of the expectations from the first – it might have developed more of a fan base.
Native Instruments seems keen to address this, recently giving X some new features such as the Play tab with a Morpher and an Animator, and also gifting the music-making community with Massive X Player, a free version of the instrument.
“Massive X is very powerful in its capabilities but it can feel a bit intimidating with its love for detail and its flexibility,” Tobias Fricke, Lead Product Manager at NI, explained. “We were looking for ways to make the instrument more accessible to our users and offer something different than what you can find in other synths.”
"We were looking for ways to make the instrument more accessible to our users"
This is not just a one-time drop but part of a larger effort to boost the profile of X with some much-needed updates. “We are dedicated to building on Massive X,” said Tobias, “and are currently working on the next free update that will include the long overdue addition of automation of all parameters – currently only macros are exposed to the DAW – plus some improvements to the Play tab.”
Twenty years on, Massive’s position as an electronic music production powerhouse remains unchanged. From its humble Reaktor instrument beginnings to its CPU-gnashing debut, through the twists and turns of the Massive X sequel release and redemptive 2025 comeback, it remains a formidably powerful force for bass.
“Massive makes basslines that are so big and impactful and interesting and intriguing and weird that it allows (for) whole genres of music,” summed up Lawrence Hart. “It’s pretty iconic in that sense.”
Lawrence Hart's Asking For a Friend is due for release 14 November.
Grab tickets for Hart's headline live show at London's Oslo on 11 November.
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