+1jake noise wrote:Pads are all about stacking oscillators, detuning them by a few cents to make the sound wider (check out your synth of choice's unison mode for the quickest and easiest way of doing this) and long evolving modulations of things like pulse width, filter cutoff/resonance, wavetable position etc with LFO's and envelopes.
Using effects can also help, but you should be able to get decent pad sounds without using effects. Try and use effects like you would spices and seasoning in cooking, they should add to the sound not overpower it. Admittedly there are occasions when heavy effect use is justified depending on the genre and how you want to shape the sound but try not to rely on them. IMHO the problem with most factory presets is overuse of effects, yes they sound impressive, but try to actually fit the sound into a track and you'll struggle as there's too much going on.
Actually thats a good point, if you're struggling to make pads try deconstructing some factory presets. I find once I turn off the effects i'm often surprised by how simple many factory pads actually are.
I don't actually use effects for pads much at all. It's true that you can get great pads by just slightly detuning 2 oscillators and then filtering them. One osc. low pass one high pass filtered works good as mentioned. Also slow modulation as mentioned.
The thing about sounds from the kitchen is that you loop just a tiny piece of that sound in your sampler, any snippet of sound can be an oscillator. Filter, envelopes, lfo's- all the normal tools of subtractive (or other) synthesis apply. It's a lot of fun.
Seriously though try detuning 2 saw waves and filter that then set your adsr envelope. Surprising how good just that alone will sound.
