Widen Your Synth Leads in NI Massive

Stereo Widening

You have probably wondered how to get that huge supersaw synth lead you often hear in today's popular EDM genres. Indeed, it's not just about choosing the right waveforms within oscillators or using the EQ to amplify specific frequencies. Sometimes, it takes that extra push to make the synth chords sound "larger than life. "In the following tutorial, I won't bother you with making the sound from scratch. Instead, I will show you a few helpful stereo-widening techniques you can find "under the hood "in Native Instruments Massive. You can see that I have already loaded an instance of NI Massive in SoundBridge and made some basic chord progression. The sound you will hear in the following audio example sounds ok, but it is far from perfect. It is a kind of a classic supersaw type of sound.  

~ Super Saw - unprocessed    

Let's Start

In the following picture, you can see an instance of NI Massive. The first section I'll use to make the synth wider is the one colored in red. Furthermore, the upper colored part is a delay effect, which I will use to make the "Haas effect. "The Haas effect can be applied to achieve a wide, open, and spacious sound, resulting in a more realistic sense of depth. Consequently, you can instantly hear the stereo image getting wider by slightly shifting the time left and time proper parameters on the NI Massive's delay effect.

~ Super Saw - Haas effect

Voicing is the next section within "NI Massive "that I will use. By default, unison voices are set to 1, but in this case, I will amplify them to 6. Now, we can see the slider of the Unison spread. This parameter deters the unison voices, and I will shift it just a bit. If we look down from here, we can see the "Pan position "and, next to it, a slider that is, by default, centered on mono. I will move it to the right to spread the sound even more. We can hear a significant difference in the stereo image with the delay and voicing sections set like this. Lastly, I will add some reverb to create a greater sense of space. So now let us listen to the unprocessed synth sound and then processed with the Haas effect and the Unison spread and finally with added reverb.

~ Super Saw - unprocessed

~ Super Saw - Haas effect + Unison spread

~ Super Saw - Haas effect + Unison spread + Reverb