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Everytime i make a bass i find it appropriate to always use 16 out of 16 voices in massive just to get a thicker sound, if theres clipping i'll just lower the volume button but i see that people often put less. Wouldn't it be a good idea to always have it maxed? maybe i'm missing something

I find you just get a cleaner sound if you use around 4, then thicken it up with effects like brauner tube, teletubes, hardclipper, sineshaper.. shit like that

you can set the max to 64. the 2 settings are max and unison. so if its set to 16max/3unison, it'll use 3 voices per key pressed with a max of 16. so if you're set to polyphonic, and press 3 keys it'll use 9 voices. most people set to monophonic when making bass anyhow.

more voices = more cpu. try setting it to 64/64 on ultra quality at 96khz and watch your pc die. not that it matters, if it sounds good then do it, you can always freeze the track.

adding unison just thickens up the sound a bit, depends what effect you're going for. one single oscillator can have more definition, multiple can have a fat sound. then theres the pitch cutoff, wavetable and pan position to make the sound even fatter.

a supersaw patch is basically a saw with tons and tons of unison.

one thing to note, if you're not set to monophonic and you're using 16/16, then when notes overlap you'll get a noise where it tries to exceed the max voices. i.e it'll try to play 32 voices as the release from the last note overlaps with the attack of the next. so it'll cut voices out as it can't exceed your max setting, and this can cause artifacts.

It's never a good idea to 'always' use anything in production.

wub wrote:It's never a good idea to 'always' use anything in production.

Exactly

I find using more than 5 or so voices with more than two oscillators sounds like absolute wank. too much going on imo, it starts to get hard to hear what note you're actually playing, could be doing something wrong though. But then again I have never really used the unison settings in massive due to the CPU issues.

Chorus and flange are a nice way to fake unison sometimes though.

I've never used more than 4. After that I use different effects to make it bigger and thicker.

Random thing to point out but Massive manuel says that its engine works best at voices set to multiples of 4. So if your worried about cpu and want to use unison set voices to 4, 8, 12 etc.

I pretty much only use one voice with monophonic stuff actually... I find that when I use multiple voices the sound has too much variation and it annoys me. Like each time I press a key its just slightly different than the last time and it bothers the hell out of me. I've found that layering and processing the sounds is much more efficient for getting those fat sounds than just a billion voices.

Easiest way to anwser this question.. if it sounds good... it sounds good.

Dublicious wrote:Easiest way to anwser this question.. if it sounds good... it sounds good.

a cool thing I read somewhere is that if you are working with a even set of voices (2, 4, 6, ect.) it is less hard on your cpu because the sound is equally matched or some shit. but I find myself using odd voices every now and then because it just fits. :p

i tend to use 4 or less with multiple OSCs i just think more voices muddys the whole thing up.