Pad Creation for Beginners |
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Pads, the mainstay of most electronic music, the bed that the melody lays on, all mushy and warm
and… mmm… Slow languorous washes of sound, swirling strings, beds of woodwind-flavoured niceness…
err… sorry, where was I? Oh, right, pads. “Where would we be without them?”, I hear you ask…
Although, more likely, if you’re new to synths then you’re asking “What are they?”
Well, a pad is a bed of sustained notes that fill- or “pad-” out the background of a tune - a nice
layer for the lead or whatever to play the melody on top of. Pads really come to the fore on
ambient stuff and in the breakdowns in tunes, anywhere where a wash of sound is needed. They come
in all flavours, but the one thing that links them is that they sustain: the notes will hold on
and fill out the space in a track.
Out of all of the sounds that you can wrench from your Synth, if it’s polyphonic then it’ll stand
or fall by its ability to produce syrupy rich pads or strings, so, when constructing a basic pad
sound from the ground up, there are a few rules to apply:
Amplifier attack times should be long - anywhere between 1 and 6 seconds until it hits the decay
cycle of the Envelope Generator.
Decay levels should smoothly follow on from the attack cycle.
Sustain should normally be fully on.
Release times should be long enough that notes don’t abruptly end when fingers are lifted, and short enough that notes don’t bleed into each other too much when changing chords.