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Pads are pretty much the trademark of ambient but there are million-billion ways of making them. 

 

I often find myself struggling to make something that fills the mix and evolves over time. How do you guys go about it?

 

So yeah, general pad discussion is open for business!

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I dont use a great deal of big complex pads, I prefer to create small FX and use lots of delay etc to make them last and morph.. but when i do a 'classic' pad its one of the few times I might be inclined to start with a preset and build on it

 

To get complex movement you generally want lots of automation.. find out which parameters on your synth sound great when they are moving and automate them.. and then you can add lots of effects with lots of automation..

Things like the audio effect rack in ableton or fx layer it bitwig are handy, as you can create lots of layers without duplicating the whole track, then you can have eg a high pass filter that doesnt destroy the sound too much.. although obviously a plugin with a dry/wet has the same effect.

 

Phasers tend to work great on pads.. metasynth image filter is great for stereo movement.. fab filter volcano two is a great plugin for making things morph too

 

Tere is nothing to stop you combining multiple pads; a high, a mid range, and a bass for example if you want it super thick and complex.. and whack on a field recording of an eastern market whynot... psychill staple

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1) absynth granular sampler - mostly for "higher" pads, load any sample, like, part of your previous track and have fun

like this

 

2) any fast synth arp blurred completely with all kind of delays, reverse delays, pitch shifters  and reverbs - for more "organic" pads (for example if we'll make random apr with sine sound and then add long reverb with 100% wet we'll get CBL-alike gurgling textures)

 

3) any "classic" synth pad with some modulations and a lot of reverb and eq

 

4) very rich transient drone sounds can be made with zynaddsubfx vst, if you use windows os

 

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Depends.

 

For deep ambient - Fucking shed loads of reverb. Up to 100 wet often . To share 100 % wet reverbs via a bus, set your track fx send to prefader, bring the volume right down and use the send in effect as a volume knob. You can send as many tracks as you want very wet to one bus reverb then without maxing out your cpu.

 

For more standard pads - at the very least modulate your filter slowly with an lfo.

 

Combination of lpf and hpf pads will help create an all round spectrum of sound.

 

Also a mix of analogue and digital somehow works.

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Sometimes the trick is to make pads sound like they're not synth sounds.

 

For unusual textures you can't beat sampling. Sample anything, even a pad sound. transpose it across a keyboard on a sampler. Somewhere there will be a sweet spot where the sound seems to take on a whole new life....then play it an octave up and an octave down. Things get organic and deep very quickly.

 

By playing around with the pitch with samplers you get sounds that you just can't make with synths alone.

 

Sampling is a little bit of a last art. I'm old enough to have owned a mono 8 bit sampler that only loaded 8 samples (max30 seconds sample time). But with that sampler and a reverb unit you could still make spacey music.

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For pads that evolve over time you need to use granular sampler/synth or a wavetable synth.

 

But you don't need to sit down and make one utterly complicated patch. If you lay down in your daw enough separate parts that all have movement it sounds to the listener like a clever patch on your synth. But it's not.

 

Where's ishq?

 

Come on ishq. Get your arse over here :-D

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software wise for classic pad ./ harmony sounds here

 

wavestation , vstation , omnisphere , largo , reaktor  , loads of samples , roland and korg waveforms in particular

 

some synths are soft and some harder , some harder synths dont do soft well at all , even when you eq cut they sound hard , some hardware is the same , i go to korg synths for air sounds , novation or roland for warmer sounds 

and for glassy / bell pads etc all of them do those well.

 

Soft sounds are the hardest , i like to sample pads as chords but thats to get an older harmonic effect that is effective still with listeners but not really trendy with producers.

 

You really want a nice pallette of sounds but then its about mastering them in the sense of knowing whats good for what and also being in control of choice and not lost in tomuch choice....knowing what you want maybe or a very fast work flow where you can a/b sounds into tracks and find that magic sound that was made for that track it seems.

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novation sounds seem to sit somewhere in between earth and sky.  good for multi layering the mid range I am finding.

 

i love the arturia prophet V for pads.  has body and loads of depth.

 

actually a lot of my pads over the past few years have been the wavetable based prophet VS which you get alongside the Prophet V in the software.  Left dry without reverb it doesn't sound that inspiring but splashed through a decent amount of reverb you get a wonderful deep but glassy sound which, because of the wavetables, has some movement.

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I have used U-he Diva for my pads mostly but lately I have been discovering my pads from Virus C and used mostly it now.. That's absolutely a great synth for making pads! Love the modulation possibilities of it, can make some reeaally nice moving pads. Then some EQ, maybe little compressing and lots of reverb on it. That's usually it :)

 

Got Valhalla Room almost a year ago now and been using that since with my pads (as with anything else also). Does the job very well :)

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