Atmospheric Pads

R

Ran

Member
Joined
Nov 7, 2012
Hi,

I'm slowly coming to something with the track i m working on. More or less got the Drums, bass leads and some effects and stab.
Now i m wondering how i could add a nice atmospheric evolving pad in the background.
In the past every try of it led to some mess with the frequencies of the other instruments. Do you usually high pass the pad before any specific EQ?

Plus, would anyone share the basics/hints to recreate those kind of pads in say sylenth or massive ?

ps : /watch?v=H0QDgcT8MlQ (future engineers - Rogue Comet ) link related
 
take ANY sound (already in the track will work a lil' better cuz it'll have the frequency content to gel with the mix) and throw a reverb on it, set the Dry/Wet to 100% and make the sustain/decay time as LONG as possible. Bounce it out to audio, reverse it. Done.

But, here's a much more in-depth tutorial from Trifonic on doing this sort of thing.

 
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Uhmm....
The trifonic's method is nice, but it makes my mixes muddy, the mega long decay will make mud happen but i usually tend to make it half way...not all the way right! But when you are in a synth, make a long attack and mess with the reverbs and delays. Experiment man! :D And yea, i usually highpass my pads ( i highpass almost everything)

Good luck!
 
Lots of good suggestions here; I usually hop on pads first to help get the mood going, and I'm not exactly an expert yet, but I've learned a few things. Always figure out what note range the pad's gonna be in that composition first, that helps me get a grounding. That way I'm not having to put an oscillator at +2 octave and trans/pitched down just to get a chord I could've gotten w/ the default settings (but that requires you know how your synthesizer works). Saves time, at the very least.

I also focus on one oscillator at a time, and add more when I need more voices. By default I tend to have a single osc on, and a reverb and echo stacked. Low-level I work on the ADSR (raise the attack, up the sustain, usually) and LFO, and a filter or two, one always on hipass to some amount. I'm really thankful for the synth I use b/c you can wire the modules in a pretty open-ended way, altho it takes a bit more work to get a sound to a "certain level" from scratch, but w/e.

From there it's really up to you, and if you got it sounding roughly how you want it in a static form, you can vary it in your composition with sub tracks and focus on integrating it with your other sounds.

That's where the real (and even more fun) challenge comes in ;).
 
Here is another tutorial on ableton analog i found yesterday http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4JkfWuPCfg
Another way to do it and pretty interesting.

I ve tried to mess with the wave form but i wasn t able to recreate the one like in the track i shared. (doesn't seem to be from a random sound neither, i may be wrong)
 
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