Advice on creating warm ambient pads?

This sound is the hardest for me to find... I really don't wanna just copy old AFX pad sounds (circa SAW 85-92 and SAW II) but they show exactly the sound i really like... Especially the song I.

 

Is there any general guideline for designing pads that could possibly streamline the process? (As you can tell, I am very new to sound design bar some basic leads/basses)

advice? buy a Juno-6, or 60 ;)

If you are into VSTs, i suggest you to get the Arturia suite , wich emulates vintage synth like the Roland Jupiter 8. When you've got this, use the ancient golden rule : Read The Fucking Manual ! You will always find useful tips in those...

 

Get some reverbs : KarmaFX Reverb, TAL-Reverb for VST example, but the bests are HARDWARE reverbs (i personnaly use a spring reverb from an old guitar amp, and it's a lot of fun).

 

And if you want to add some warmth to your sound, i suggest to add a subtle distortion, and even record the pad on tape if you got an old recorder.

 

So, in a nutshell, all you need is :

 

1 - a good synth

2 - a good reverb

3 - put some effort into the production (be inventive)

Edited February 6, 2012 by Diabrotikos

Put the pad in the microwave in the microwave for three minutes, but be sure to stir it around halfway through or else it will get all dried out & not lush on top.

people say Absynth is cool for pads and stuff... Also, Omnisphere, but I don't like that it has like over 80gb of presets (I only have 5 left)... Oneohtrix Point Never use it.

Edited February 6, 2012 by logakght

Use field recordings along with samples and vsts. You need a mix of sounds.

 

Google "Analogue Vsts"

Edited February 6, 2012 by chassis

I used to get really nice warm, sometimes analog sounding pads just using a TX81Z and a delay pedal. Gently applying a slow LFO to pitch (or anything else subtle but noticeable really), run through delay is a pretty easy way to get some warmth.

EQ

I find that my pads get sufficiently warm on high flow days. Maybe you should ask your doctor if a different kind of birth control pill is right for you?

Edited February 6, 2012 by baph

Ive tried a lot of these things, it seems my biggest enemy would be experience at this point.

 

So, would it be possible somehow to route a synth coming out of my audio interface into my guitar pedals? I have a really good reverb/delay setup that would sound sublime on a synth.

If you're into VST's, try the DCAM Synth Squad suite from FXpansion. It comes with with three separate synths - there's one called Amber that does really nice strings. It's dead easy to program.

 

As far as general tips go, try layering multiple pad patches in unisson. As others have pointed out, pitch modulation, distortion and delay/reverb are also good ways to thicken up a pad. PW modulation is also good, routing oscillators to HPFs and LPFs in parallel is also usually good for pad patches.

 

  On 2/6/2012 at 11:06 PM, sergeantk said:

So, would it be possible somehow to route a synth coming out of my audio interface into my guitar pedals? I have a really good reverb/delay setup that would sound sublime on a synth.

 

Interface line out -> guitar delay pedal -> interface line in

  On 2/6/2012 at 11:11 PM, kokeboka said:

If you're into VST's, try the DCAM Synth Squad suite from FXpansion. It comes with with three separate synths - there's one called Amber that does really nice strings. It's dead easy to program.

 

As far as general tips go, try layering multiple pad patches in unisson. As others have pointed out, pitch modulation, distortion and delay/reverb are also good ways to thicken up a pad. PW modulation is also good, routing oscillators to HPFs and LPFs in parallel is also usually good for pad patches.

 

  On 2/6/2012 at 11:06 PM, sergeantk said:

So, would it be possible somehow to route a synth coming out of my audio interface into my guitar pedals? I have a really good reverb/delay setup that would sound sublime on a synth.

 

Interface line out -> guitar delay pedal -> interface line in

 

Thats what I figured. If the line outs are TRS, i dont think a regular instrument cable would work... Nonetheless its worth a try.

Filter setting is important I think. Also delay + reverb is a good combination. For software I really like the free TAL delays and reverb

  On 2/6/2012 at 8:27 PM, Cryptowen said:

Put the pad in the microwave in the microwave for three minutes, but be sure to stir it around halfway through or else it will get all dried out & not lush on top.

Lolz.

I think making great pads is something that can take a while to get your head around. its hard to get them sounding super full and lush without completely blowing out a mix, difficult to scale just the right ammount of unison/detained to thicken it without it getting a bit too detuned.

 

Personally, I find using saw waves works best for pads. square can be cool but a bit too bold a lot of the time. Very subtle detuning of oscillators is a good start too, you'll start to hear them phase against each other, thickens up nicely.

 

more oscillators the better too, you can tune them over an octave or maybe tune one at a fifth, quietly in there it will really fill the sound.

 

slow, unsynched modulations on osc tuning fills it out as well, if possible try to have a separate mod source for each osc so you get some really rich swirly pitch goodness. Just don't over cook the modulation amount or it gets ugly fast.

 

The other thing with old synths, especially things like old korg polysynths. A lot of them had a kinda octave scaling effect, where the voltage used to drive the oscillators is not quite regular through the whole keyboard. the result would be that the distance between middle C and the next C up wouldn't be quite an octave... And the same all the way up the keyboard. It's subtle but the slight differences in pitch make stuff sound really rich.

 

filters an stuff, it depends... Go for subtlety I guess. I found that a combo of a gentle LP and gentle HP works well. Just enough to roll out the frequencies you don't want, not loads of resonance getting all ugly and ruining the warm detuned saws.

 

As for effects, well there's a whole bunch of things you can try.. for that SAW kinda sound though I reckon good reverb is most important. Those albums are ALL about the reverbs... I dunno if you'd get quite the same results using slightly more fancy patches like convolutions and so forth, I think a lot of SAW is maybe lexicon shit, or other slightly trashy but lush algorithms. You can get a lot of the old Lexicon verbs as plugins now, they do sound fkn lush too, expensive though.

 

Like someone mentioned, effect circuits is a very cool idea. send the synth down multiple paths with different effects. maybe a slight bit of frequency shifting, chorus, ring mod, or even a subtle tremolo. Into a sub mix with separate left and rights for each "chain" of you circuit to really sculpt the stereo image, out into your main verb.

 

I'd only say, try to be super light with any final EQ, try to take care of that side of things with the synths filters and verbs low and hi cuts, too much dicking about with EQ strips starts to make it sound a bit warped and unnatural.

 

ah well, long post, of course there's a million other ways to make awesome pads, loads of experiments to try. good luck

Good post man

subtle tube overdrive with a slight ring mod on the filter

 

also pitching the audio down can make things seem more warm and lo-fi, SAW2 is full of this

Sonny you should post a step by step guide on how to make a warm analog pad

 

If it comes out sounding like Optimus Prime raping a car THEN WE'LL KNOW FOR SURE

I'd say that TechDiff's advice is spot on. Using a softsynth where you can casually throw in more oscillators is, in many ways, much better than the hardware synths that people had to put up with in the 90s, that only had one or two oscillators per note, and often had to use chorus to thicken up the sound. You can do the real thing, having lots of oscillators all slightly detuned from one another, and then run the whole ensemble (as it were) through a chorus as well. It's been a while since I've had a hardware polysynth, but by carefully

, and by sampling individual notes from a monophonic hardware synth and loading the result into a polyphonic sampler, you can get some really nice, thick, lush sounds.

 

  On 2/7/2012 at 2:42 PM, TechDiff said:

As for effects, well there's a whole bunch of things you can try.. for that SAW kinda sound though I reckon good reverb is most important. Those albums are ALL about the reverbs... I dunno if you'd get quite the same results using slightly more fancy patches like convolutions and so forth, I think a lot of SAW is maybe lexicon shit, or other slightly trashy but lush algorithms. You can get a lot of the old Lexicon verbs as plugins now, they do sound fkn lush too, expensive though.

 

Apparently RDJ had a Quadraverb circa 1992, so it was probably that. At any rate, it's an early-ish (certainly by today's standards) digital reverb. If you have a decent software reverb (and most DAWs come with at least one these days), you really don't have to pine after any fancy equipment. It's much more about how it's used than what was used. The state of the art back then was digital reverb, which is much more realistic than spring and plate reverbs, but it was way before convlolution reverb, as TechDiff says. So if you want that specific kind of sound, pretty much any good pre-convolution digital reverb should do the job... but remember to try out other kinds too! Find your own sound.

 

  On 2/7/2012 at 7:34 PM, soundwave said:

also pitching the audio down can make things seem more warm and lo-fi, SAW2 is full of this

 

Yes, I tried this out and it works very well. I've been doing it quite a bit on and off ever since. Get some nice orchestral samples, oboes, violas and so on, anything soft and sustained, play them about two octaves down from their real pitch, use the offset to bypass the initial transients, add a slow attack and release, and add delay and reverb to taste. It will end up sounding more like a synthesiser than an orchestral instrument, but a synthesiser with subtle variations and nuances.

 

SAW-II could pretty much have been a showcase of digital music making. It sounds like the whole album was made on just a sampler and a digital delay and reverb unit. Again, any DAW provides similar functionality only an order of magnitude more powerful and easier to use. What makes these albums special is the techniques used to create them, and the emotions they convey, not the equipment used to create them.

 

TL;DR: take TechDiff's advice.

im not sure the comparison to vst vco's and analogue hardware stands

 

i tried some 32 vco stacked over four aruria moog modular v's and it was no where near a unison memorymoog in sound but upper harmonics are an area most digital sources fall short unless its processing at a really high resolution like 96khz+

 

if you know what your doing with FM synthesis less modulation into the main carrier waves can emphisise the fundemental harmonic for a warmer tone

I'm going to second what others have said about sampling a monophonic synth. I've had lovely results sampling a VST I liked that didn't play well with pitch bends, adding a slight amount of LFO to the pitch, adding a bit of faint ambient noise, applying EQ and running the resulting WAV through a polyphonic sampler.

Pad sounds I've been using lately:

 

record a long arpeggio on the MS-10 (generally sticking to one chord). Tune it a 4th/5th/etc up & record again. Set them both as sample sources in a granular synth, set the grain density to high & have it pick short blips randomly from each arp. Write a new melody with it. Creates a thick kinda messy pad.

 

hyper-timestretch a breakbeat & write a melody with it that plays alongside the original (or whatever the original has been chopped into), through the same effects. Subtle tonal synchronisation.

 

edit- oh yeah also been making what I think of as old cowboy movie string pads by playing the dulcimer through delay pedals & sampling it. As heard in

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yOFaR0CG0A

Edited June 1, 2012 by Cryptowen

paulstretch

How to build a simple pad:

 

Use three oscillators, each set to sine, and tuned slightly differently. Use a slow attack and a long release. Some delay and/or reverb will also help smooth it out. Triangle waves can help as well.

 

If you're using FM, you can use the same method of a slow attack and long release, but modulate each carrier with a sine wave a little bit for added harmonics. If you use a sawtooth, it's a bit more difficult to make it sound smooth.

  On 6/5/2012 at 6:02 PM, Braintree said:

If you use a sawtooth, it's a bit more difficult to make it sound smooth.

 

Just tap the filt freq down to low-mid and increase the res to mid, add sub osc and chorus = wooooooommmmmmm.