Let’s talk about the new Native Instruments Massive X

Native Instruments Massive X is the successor to one of the most notable synth plugins of the past few decades.

The original version of Massive was legendary for various reasons – it was incredibly intuitive and offered unmatched audio quality at the time and set somewhat of a standard for VST plugins to follow. The huge array of oscillator and filter types, alongside the simple interface quickly made it the go-to swiss-army knife tool for music producers and sound designers. Massive arguably helped shape the sound of various genres across the spectrum.

Native Instruments Massive X is the next step in the evolution, offering up some exciting new features such as a ton of variety in each of the sections, but also a completely configurable modular signal path, allowing you to route the modules together as you please.

The release of Native Instruments Massive X has been delayed for a while, however it’s finally here and so far, the audio demos sound great. However, there are a few things I want to address…

“Built for a new decade, designed to evolve” …

Fast forward over a decade since the release of the original Massive and the plugin game has changed drastically, due in part to the standard, which was set by Massive, many years ago. Plugins such as Serum and Phase Plant offer some serious competition, not only in terms of sheer audio quality, but ease-of-use too.

There are a few key aspects that are sticking out for me, that are not only is present in most of the competition but even in the original Massive plugin, however hopefully we will see these being introduced in an update. So far Native Instruments Massive X doesn’t offer wavetable import and there are no oversampling settings.

Massive X is going for USD $199 (Around R2850) however if you own the previous version you can crossgrade for USD $149 (Around R2150). Owners of Komplete 12 can get Massive X for free through the Native Access application.