Ableton Forum

Purely for educational purposes, as I'm new to this, I wanted to recreate a Massive preset with Operator. So I went to dissect the sound, turning on each oscillator individually and turning off any effects on Massive. I started to run into problems right away. The oscillators don't have individual tune control (not down anyway). Why is that? Why can I pitch an oscillator up but not down? The workaround is to just work from the lowest note and tune up from there, but what if I don't wanna?
Do I have to create an instrument rack with a chain for a separate Operator and then add a pitch plug in to the ones I want to tune down? Makes me wonder why I would use Operator at all?

I could be comparing apples and oranges here but please help me understand this.

soultwist wrote: I could be comparing apples and oranges here but please help me understand this.

more like comparing pineapples to cherries. Operator is an FM synth, as such it's a completely different kind of synthesis than Wavetable synthesis which Massive is.

Operator uses additive and reductive harmonics to create different timbres, along with other tricks, but essentially that..
Massive uses wavetables, and arguably is a bit "thicker" sounding. IE most people think of FM synthesis as being pretty clean and digital in nature, while wavetable/analog filter modeling as being phatter/messier. On that note Massive uses most of your CPU to do this, while Operator is pretty light. Anyway, if it's a thick messy sound, it's going to be pretty hard to create with Operator alone. Conversely some more grinding digital noise and clean DX7 style sounds will just not fly as well with Massive.

every synth sounds different. if not, we all would need and use only one of them.
but i think, about 50% of all the sounds out there could be made with more or less all synths (if they cover the technical requirements) - not 100% but similar enough for musical needs.
it´s the best way to learn using a synth if you try to copy sounds from annother synth. often you have to go different ways to get the same result.
if it´s possible to transpose your sound from massive to operator... hm, we can´t know if we dont´n know your sound. maybe you can post it?

Saxer wrote: but i think, about 50% of all the sounds out there could be made with more or less all synths (if they cover the technical requirements) - not 100% but similar enough for musical needs.

It's vastly easier to copy sounds from similar synthesis styles though, no doubt.
I know your can get a lot closer to a Moog Modular VA with the Jupiter 8 VA,
or FM8 sounds with Operator,
or Massive with Zebra,

Trying to copy a complex FM synthesis patch on a virtual analogue, or wavetable is a lot harder than even wavetable to virtual analogue.
Just very different base concepts, of course if you have a simple sound it's not that bad.

I forget what the preset was called, but it was actually a pretty gritty/'messy' sound.
Thanks for the explanations everyone.