Sounds like an FM kind of sound or wave table with some weird phaser/flanger effects going on. I would probably mess around with Serum to get something similar!

Yeah, that's why they're referring to the sample company Audentity.

And by from the synth, do you mean the loops and sounds from the actual sampler, or do you mean they created vocal chops using the plugin and uploaded those? Because if they're utilizing the plugin the way it's intended and creating musical vocal chops, there's nothing wrong with it - they created something unique with the idea.

If they're just pulling the sounds straight, without processing or alteration, that's a different issue.

A good chunk of them were just presets from the synth which is where I was like uhmmmmmm...

I'm starting to learn that if you want denser songs to be loud, it needs to be mixed for it not overly compressed and limited during mastering. How do you go about making a dense mix loud? Is it compressing every signal or are the levels of everything more important?

Most of the tonality of that pad is coming from the chords. Other than that it's probably a low passed saw with maybe an FM type waveform that has lots of upper harmonics. Look up how to make the pad from I Remember and you'll get it!

If you're doing in the box mastering, with say Ozone for example, you'd probably import the whole album into an instance of Ozone as well as one or two reference tracks you or your client really like and think are a good sonic match to the tracks being mastered. Then you find what you think is the best overall mix in the album already, something that represents the album's style more than anything else, and master that one first. When that first track is done, it becomes much easier to master to a similar sonic character as the first one and make all the pre-masters sound like one cohesive piece. I'm no mastering engineer, but at school this was how I learned lots of people do it.

I use Ableton Live and love it to death! That being said, I would recommend it or FL over anything else. If you're leaning toward Ableton make sure to give it some time, because it really has way more functionality than what you think is on the surface. I've been using it for 6 years and am still finding extremely useful features in it!

r&b. i'm dying.