How do you do it? Feel free to share your techniques and tips!

One technique I have been using lately is to take a sound, play it at c3, bounce it to paul stretch (plugin that can create really long smearing effects by stretching the sound), stretch it at a given time (lets say x200), bounce that back to Ableton (or your given DAW), and then load the stretched sound into a sampler and play a chord off of it.

Another is taking a sound and throwing it into a reverb with a really long decay time, then bounce that to audio and use just the tail part, which is mostly generated by the reverb at that point. It doesn't always work but it can get interesting results nonetheless.

So let's hear yours!

I like to do a lot of layering to make a "complete" pad, so what I usually start doing is making a patch that I will sort of base the overall vibe and tone of the pad on. Incidentally, it usually falls within my """style""". Anyway, I open up a synth (usually Sylenth for the base patch) and make two oscillators saw waves and two oscillators tri saw waves; turn off retrigger on one of the oscillators with a saw and one with a tri saw. I detune all of them a fair bit and then lowpass to taste, which is usually about 37Hz - 136Hz. Then, I put a chorus and a flanger on the patch and put the volume of both to about 25%, stereo widen a little, add reverb and usually adjust the volume of the reverb between 10% - 35% (depending on the track). Sometimes I will also use the built-in chorus in Sylenth and put the wetness at 10%, give it a lot of depth and width, and put the chorus rate at .01Hz for a little bit of an added effect. Once I am done with tweaking those things around, I EQ out everything but the mids.

After that, I start working on the pad that will be the "airy" highs. I usually use a triangle wave, bandpass it, EQ out the mids and lows, stereo widen, and add lots of reverb. Nothing super special; the only thing I really do much with this pad is modulate the wetness of the reverb, pan a little, maybe add a phaser and then slowly modulate the wetness of the phaser while keeping the volume around 10% - 15%.

Lastly, I make the bass. The bass is usually really simple and I don't really try to do anything fancy because I like the bass to stay in the center and hold everything together, so it's usually a detuned saw with a lowpass filter that has really high resonance (I don't know how many Hz the cutoff on the lowpass is because 3xosc doesn't show it when I adjust, but it's pretty low), EQ out highs and mids and then it's done.

I don't make all my pads this way, but this is usually how it starts out before I completely switch patches or effects out to make the sound I want for a track.

Seamlessr actually posted a really helpful video on pads recently.  It's short and sweet, but gives a lot of good info!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu0yhLk9V6I

Also from my personal experience, lots of chorus and reverb on some highpassed saws or sine waves.

Paulstretch and Valhalla Shimmer are my go-to methods for making cool ambient pads!

What does Paulstretch do? Can you elaborate on that? I've never heard of that synth before :0

Quote from: Ocular on January 07, 2016, 03:16:04 am

Paulstretch and Valhalla Shimmer are my go-to methods for making cool ambient pads!

What does Paulstretch do? Can you elaborate on that? I've never heard of that synth before :0

Not really a synth, but more of an extreme time stretcher. You could basically insert a 10 seconds audio file and stretch it into something like 10 minutes or so. You can imagine that it can make some pretty dope ambient/pad texture depending on the kind of audio material you give it to eat. And it's free (Donationware actually) for Windows, Linux & OSX !

Otherwise, I find that granular processing (which is pretty much similar to time stretching anyway...) can lead to very cool pad sounds with pretty much everything. Just a matter of trying different things out and finding what you like and where to use it. Reverb is another thing that can turn pretty  much anything into an instant pad.

The hardest thing for me is how to cut pad by LP filter but still have it kinda "airy', with some presence. Should it be acomplished by layering or EQ or something else?

If you have Ableton, I recommend grabbing Rob Henke's Granulator II Max for Live plugin. Anything metallic or bell sounding, vocals, or certain tonic percussive elements make for spooky or ethereal sounding pads.

Quote from: Mat_Zo on January 07, 2016, 10:00:50 am

Absynth is my go to pad synth, and I heard from Thijs from Noisia that Reaktor 6 is great for pads as well, which I can't wait to try out. Any synth with good granular/fractal synthesis and a good selection of filters will be good for pads.

As said before, paulstretch is a great tool for turning anything into a pad, I use it on nearly all my tracks, especial ones with vocals.

Can you elaborate as to what makes absynth and/or granular synthesis good for pads? I have heard this before, but am a little curious as to why

With pads, the more organic sound the texture the better, and granular synthesis, fractal synthesis are the best way to get that organic textured sound (combined with loads of filters and delay/reverb type effects)