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This is a subject Ive always been fascinated with when it comes to music in general.. From rock music using guitar pedals to create atmospheres to jungle tracks using those almost perfect pieces of sound design...

I was reading through my Sub Bass tutorial and thought i'd start a thread about another subject I am passionate about when making music (and usually sucks up most of my time and energy)

Eventually i'll add up some tutorials so.. watch this space but feel free to add tracks with your favourite pads and tips and tricks .

** RESERVING POST **

Hey look, it's a thread that matters.

"It uses FM synthesis, which had just been worked out at Stanford, and later became the staple of Yamaha's DX7 series of synthesizers, and also a special purpose filter design program written (in Fortran IV) by Ken Steiglitz. Oh yes, the harmonic language of the piece is related to George Perle's 12-tone modal system."



The most beautiful pad sound of all time.

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

i wish i had some nice pad samples

more pads and atmospherics and less skrillex roor basses

lyons238 wrote: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.

hankerins wrote:

lyons238 wrote: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.

yeah i guess your right i should spend more time making my own pad sounds

i gotta say i find making pads one of the easier things about music production. on massive, i'll usually whack the reverb right up, use saw waves or the polysaw, tune them how i like them, automate some fx over them, bit of unison and chorus. other things i've tried is using vocals timestretched loads, tuning the pads to a major or minor chord, all sorts of stuff. and i've probably not scratched the surface!

Basic single osc waveform, or a couple oscs detuned. whack a reverb, wet all way up dry all the way down and maybe a subtle phaser and maybe delay. Most basic pad ever haha

hankerins wrote: Never use pad samples...

Rubbish advice IMO.

try to put the reverb before the filter. Can easily be done in some modular vsts or use something like tal-filter at the end of the fx chain.

Pads are one of the easier sounds to create imo.
Take any sound, sample, synth, etc.
Change the sample start position, add reverb, up the sustain add modulation for a slight hypnotic wobble.
Detune 2 or 3 samples to add the fullness.

Play complementary notes.

sine wave osc with chorus, phaser, stereo widening etc. are good i think. plus experimenting with weird adsr shapes on both filter and amplitude can get some interesting results. reverb on full can work sometimes but other times it makes the pad sound too background to hear. i suppose it depends on the vibe you are going for

and theres nowt wrong with using samples. you can SOMETIMES do far more interesting things with samples and sampler than with synths

yeah does anyone have any links to any pad samples?

but im also going to try to make my own. i think reasons modular ways will be good for things like the guy above said. putting reverb before the filter.

Shum wrote:

hankerins wrote: 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.

humongous combinators ful of maelstroms and thors with different attack phases, routed to a mixer
enjoy using sends and inserts and panning. freewheeling, slow, kooky waveform LFO''s to CV out to spider CV merge/split into filter cutoffs, index, shift, channel panning, volume etc

Combi out into a scream4 tape with mild compression, little to no damage to gel it all together, maybe other master FX

then go back and fuck with the oscilators
paddyness

or just an XT full of resampled chords, and then fuck about with amp envelopes, outputs to mixer channels, see above post...

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!