PADS - the nitty gritty

[skwiggo]

might b that cheesy pads are easy to make but really really great pads aren't.
i can spend hours working on them, layering, saturating, filtering... i listen to a lot of shoegaze-y ambient guitar stuff, so i tend to distort my pads or run them through a guitar amp, then layer them with granulated foley sounds or field recordings that have delays or sublte sidechaining on them to add extra movement, and automate everything subtly to have it ebb and flow with the track.
but that's just my specific approach (at least one thing where i feel like i've found my style...) and i haven't really gotten good results in the vein of classic jungle/'intelligent dnb' tunes, so i'm lookin forward to your tips, legend4ry!

i love these tips thanks! i personally love a wee bit of grit in my pads, bit reduction, saturation etc.

I also like to convert shitty pad sounds to audio, timestretch or pitch them down, chop them up, overcompress and reverse them, flanger/phaser etc. makes a cheesy pad sound into something a lot more interesting

[hankerins]

Never use pad samples...

Rubbish advice IMO.

I have to agree. I sample my pads all of the time. They usually start from one of my hardware analog synths and then get sampled for more processing.

sorry thats not what i meant at all. i was referring to dropping TranceVibezPad14.wav (or whatever) into a project and calling it finished, which i think is a terrible idea. Using samples as raw material to manipulate into something more interesting is a much better idea, which is what I think we're both talking about.

[mks]

I hear ya mang. Sampling pads is a technique I've used for years going back to the jungle/dnb days. I love that sound.

[paravrais]

OK.

To anyone who said that making pads is easy...you're wrong. I'm sorry but you just are.

I've been spending a lot more time on my pads recently and realising that in the kind of music I make they are often the most important ingredient. To create a really beautiful sound scape you need multiple pads all interacting with each other and creating various different textures. Oh and automation. A hella lotta automation!

I will usually have 3 or 4 instances of Alchemy for 'atmosphere' in my tracks these days. I suppose 2 or 3 of them could be classed as pads and the other more noise based atmosphere or something. It's very easy to create a shitty pad just by whaking tons of reverb on something but creating truly pretty pads is so difficult. I wish I had more advice to share but I'm still a novice really.

Some people who I massively respect for their padwork include Nathan Fake, Jon Hopkins, Phaeleh and most of the people releasing on hospital at the moment. Epic jealousy.

[djake]

for amazing pads, granular synthesis is the one in my eyes, after some sound design in another synth to get a nice base sound.

the great thing about granular synthesis is that you can with the right synth process each of those little grains individually creating some serious unique textures.

[efence]

um legendary i think all of the nice pads are sitting in your soundcloud silly

i wish i had some nice pad samples

Never use pad samples. I understand using drum samples as synthesizing a good drum sound is very difficult (and a great skill to learn) but making your ambient sounds is where your personality should come into the music. Why resort to premade pads? You can take a sample from any song and process it into a cool pad with a little effort. Take a sample from one of your favorite non-electronic songs and start playing with it, you'll be much happier with the results and it will really sound like your music.

Two things you should check out: granular synthesis and convolution. I repped them both in an older thread about building soundscapes that you can probably find easily, or just search the net.

i agree with making pads generic pad sample with big reverb but i will say layering or building pads out of samples like real life recordings can give a natural quality almost impossible to synthesize. Like layer the sound of a jet taking off or passing by instead of filtered white noise,

[Y_H]

I dont have anything to add really, i dont have a way of making pads, i take a different approach every time i make one.
Will be keeping an eye on this thread!

[buttock]

if you have a modular synth like karmafx,tassman etc try this:
send an Oscillator to two bandpass filters with a steep slope, mix them together with the dry Output send all to a lowpass. Set the one cutoff of the bandpasses to a pretty high frequency, the other one to something low. Set up two Lfos each modulating the Cutoff of one of the bandpasses at different rates. Tweak the master lowpass, and tweak the mixing ratio
tassman patch
http://www.file-upload.net/download-335 ... s.txf.html

karmapatch
http://www.file-upload.net/download-335 ... d.kfx.html

[fragments]

OK.

To anyone who said that making pads is easy...you're wrong. I'm sorry but you just are.

I've been spending a lot more time on my pads recently and realising that in the kind of music I make they are often the most important ingredient. To create a really beautiful sound scape you need multiple pads all interacting with each other and creating various different textures. Oh and automation. A hella lotta automation!

I will usually have 3 or 4 instances of Alchemy for 'atmosphere' in my tracks these days. I suppose 2 or 3 of them could be classed as pads and the other more noise based atmosphere or something. It's very easy to create a shitty pad just by whaking tons of reverb on something but creating truly pretty pads is so difficult. I wish I had more advice to share but I'm still a novice really.

Some people who I massively respect for their padwork include Nathan Fake, Jon Hopkins, Phaeleh and most of the people releasing on hospital at the moment. Epic jealousy.

I'm trying to think of how exactly to put this...generally speaking I think a lot of producers (all along the scale of skill) would say pads are "easy" to make--because it is easy to make an acceptable pad, one that will work, especially for tracks that aren't relying heavily on atmospherics. However, I agree making really awesome pads/atmospherics that a track can rely on is pretty difficult.

Before I broke down my studio to move I'd been playing around with using time stretching samples + reverb +???FX to use as pads or atmospherics, haven't quite got the knack of it yet, but it's already apparent there are a lot of awesome directions this technique can take you.

Gonna have to jump on this granular synthesis bit.

[flatfaced]

the most amazing pad that i've ever heard...by Hecq :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpftopO54O4

am using it as a reference

[CBK81]

Protip - buy Alchemy. It makes pads like nothing else!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKUhVkUKUNU

[upstateface]

Remember, the chords you play are just as important as the sound itself for creating atmosphere.

[mks]

Remember, the chords you play are just as important as the sound itself for creating atmosphere.

Bingo

My pads are not just one note jobbies filled with a bunch of effects but rather chords that outline the harmonic movement of the track and are put there to emphasize some sort of emotional feeling.

In fact, I find if I have the right pad sound and the right chord, I do not even have to add a whole lot of effects to it, maybe just a bit of reverb to make it gel with the track.

[Wrigzilla]

Remember, the chords you play are just as important as the sound itself for creating atmosphere.

Even if you're doing some Ulrich Schnuass shit this is the most important factor.

[kaiori breathe]

sine waves (3 octave spread) + chorus + stereo imaging + lfo to cut off with slow attack if you're feeling a bit spicy
saw waves, detuned, (3 octave spread) + Chorus + phaser
barely audible matt of white noise layered under.

Layer under a few samples, string sections, choir ahhhs, choir ooooohs, water from a tap going through a vocoder.

Get the sines and saws to play, for example, a C chord spread out, so C4, G4, E5
Have the string section maybe just play the C4, the choir sample just play out the G4, the water just play out the E5

Then I'll maybe get a piano to play the chord, kill it with reverb and delay, then sample it and reverse it and layer that sound under the pad.

Then I'll beat the shit out of it with reverb and delay again. Put a low pass filter on it. Beat the shit out of it again with reverb and delay. (In case you haven't noticed beating the shit out of things with reverb and delay is integral to my music making process)

EQ it.

Done.

That's how I tend to do it anyway.

[daft cunt]

Key elements for the sound design are : chorus, unison, resonance/cutoff automation and reverb.
Almost any waveform will make a good pad with that.

Then, like Wrigzilla said, it's all about the chords you play and even a basic 1 osc patch can sound awesome. Play 4 or 5 keys chords and learn about chord inversion to make your chord progressions more interesting.

Also, learn about unusal chords like those called min7, sus4 or 7u4. Chances are, that's the ones you hear when you're listening to Instra:mental or dBridge and wonder how the fuck they came up with such gorgious pads.

Layer that - using Alchemy - with choirs, timestretched orchestral bits or granulized sounds and you're in the land of awesome.

Really, pads are difficult to make only when you're doing it wrong

Have a look at the vid below and pay attention to the chord progression on the piano roll @ 1:24. See how the guy's playing 3 to 5 keys chords ? Also notice the notes all are in the same range, that's chord inversion at work. It helps make the progression sound much more consistent.

[hankerins]

i just want to reiterate what everyone's saying about actually having some musicality to your pads via chord progressions. Learning music theory is just as (even more?) important as learning production techniques if you want to make your own tunes imho.

On a second point, it's not always the best idea to think of your songs as segmented into categories like drums, bass, lead, and pad. While these terms are often applicable, they can pigeonhole your creative process if you overthink them. For instance, if you consider a tune more or less finished once you have your drums, bass, lead, and pad finished, or if you don't consider a song finished until it has something going on in each of these categories, your work might not be very diverse.

A different approach would be to come up with one musical idea - a melodic motive, a rhythmic pattern, whatever - then add in the fewest sounds necessary to support that musical idea for ~4 minutes. Aside from the main motive, don't repeat a single sound more than once. With this approach, you'll see your sound design and song structure in a very different light. That's just one example, but there are a lot of ways to conceptualize your musical palette. Hell, you could say that the great Classical composers were just really, really good at making pads (their percs were garbage though).

[jaydot]

I just use Ableton's pads partly through laziness partly through not knowing where to start... and whilst there's some good ones I really want to start synthesising, in general more, but especially pads because I think they're integral to atmosphere and there's a hell of a lot of things you can do with them. I'm digging vocal pads a lot. In fact. Today I will make a pad patch.

[JFK]

I just use Ableton's pads partly through laziness partly through not knowing where to start... and whilst there's some good ones I really want to start synthesising, in general more, but especially pads because I think they're integral to atmosphere and there's a hell of a lot of things you can do with them. I'm digging vocal pads a lot. In fact. Today I will make a pad patch.

Why dont you try resampling one of the Ableton pads and sticking your own FX on it? Make it a bit more unique.

[buttock]

another thing i reasonly tried out was to "split up" a Pad using 3 or 4 different synths each one used in momophone mode. If you are familiar with chords, lay down a chord progression, copy the midi file to each of the synths, cut out all but one of the voices, for each synth a different one, so that you have a 3 or 4 "melodies" for each instrument. There are many ways to split up the chord sequence an you can add rhytmic variaions on each of the voices, different automations,fx etc...