Make a Screaming Formant Synth Lead

Dubstep Formant Lead

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you probably have heard dubstep, whether you were aware of it or not. This genre needs no introduction for many people. However, for those who would like to know a bit more about its origins, let's say it draws its roots from the 90s UK Garage, Drum & Bass, Jungle, and Dub. Nowadays, it has evolved into something utterly unique regarding sound design and music production. First, it is known for its heavy beats with a particular accent on the snare drums and screaming synth and bass leads, with the tempo usually at 140 BPM. In the following tutorial, I will try to demonstrate how to make one of the most common sounds heard in this kind of music. So let's get started!  

Let's Start Oscillating!

Firstly, let's add a new instance of Massive by Native Instruments on the newly made MIDI channel in Lumit. Additionally, I'll start with a clean initial preset and move to the first oscillator section. Here, I will choose a basic Square waveform and decrease the oscillator's pitch by a few octaves. Next, I will select "Formant "mode from the mode menu. With the oscillator parameters set like this, we got a high-pitched sound.

~Oscillator 1 with Formant mode

Also, I will add a second oscillator, with, let's say, an F-Saw waveform also pitched down by a few octaves to get some low end.

~Oscillator 1 & 2

To get closer to that screaming type of lead, let's add a filter in Scream mode. The cutoff parameter is set to the right, the Scream parameter at 12 o'clock, and Resonance to the right.  

~Oscillator 1 & 2 with Filter in scream mode  

Screaming Formant

To make things more interesting, let's modulate the Intensity knob of the two oscillators by using the LFO performer found in the middle section of Massive. As you can see below, I made a short sequence in the performer section. After that, I just dragged and dropped the cursor icon to the intensity knob in the oscillators section. Furthermore, we could add a Dimension expander as an effect to get a wider stereo sound. Let's hear how everything sounds now with some previously made rhythm.

~Final Lead with Rhythm