Transcription
When I started getting into synthesis, I heard this term thrown around quite a bit that I wasn't really familiar with: "pad." Beethoven didn't use a lot of pads, I guess. It seemed to describe these sounds that were kind of tucked away in the background of electronic music tracks, usually playing chords or providing the sort of harmonic backbone to a track, or maybe just as an underlying bed of textures that evolved over time. Beyond that, I really didn't know too much about them, but it didn't take me too long to realize that I absolutely love them.
But if you're anything like me and you make music with, let's call them, ambient tendencies, there's a tendency to get so intoxicated with pads that they get kind of stagnant after a while. And I can easily get lost noodling around with synth pads for hours without ever actually making any music with them, which is kind of a problem for me since that's what I want to do. So today, I'll show you some of the methods that I've used over the past decade and continue to use to this day to keep my pads more interesting, either through sound design or perhaps more importantly, like how we use pads in the music that we actually make.
And stuff, I have one extremely general rule when it comes to synth patches: the more complex or busy the patch, the less complex or busy the writing should be. And the simpler the patch, the more flexibility I have with the harmonies and the parts themselves. In other words, it's more playable if it's more of a simple patch. Essentially, I like to pick a leader: either the sound design or the notes themselves. And in that case, I'm using the synthesis as more like orchestration. But I'm also a big believer that if you have a cake, you should also figure out a way to eat it. So a little later in the video, we'll talk about some ways to combine these worlds and sort of walk that line between those two spaces: cool sound design and linear harmonic progressions that make the music have some sort of emotional and linear direction and make it a little less stagnant.
But first, let's talk about synthesis because I'm a huge nerd. Of course, to have a synth pad, we need a synth, don't we? I love a good old analog, analog. I love a good old old analog poly synth as much as anyone, and they're really great for that second approach where, you know, we have a more simple sound that is more playable and it just sounds good. Like, that's what they're good at. But if we really want to get a little bit more involved with our sound design, a little crazier, maybe a subtractive analog synth is actually pretty limited. So I'll show you some of my favorite types of synthesis that I like to use to make more interesting pads. And I'm going to show you some specific synths, and it's just because those are the synths that I have. It's not because I want you to go and buy those. I'll give you some software alternatives as well as some free things that you can pick up and use right now. By the way, I'm sponsored by none of these gear manufacturers nor the software companies that I'm going to mention, and that's how you can know that here on this channel, I am making no money through sponsorships.
So let's do a speed run through synthesis, shall we? Instead of simple waveforms like you would find in an analog synth, you know, your triangle, your sawtooth, your square wave, digital wavetables are capable of producing much richer and weirder harmonics, which means you start with something a lot crazier and then you can still shave it down with filters or whatever if you want to do that. But it also means they can sound really terrible and thin and nasal and really crappy. For a long time, I thought I absolutely hated wavetables, but it turns out it's very dependent on which wavetable you're using and the sweet spots that you can find within that wavetable. And getting that wavetable moving a little bit is really important for creating evolving pads, which is what we're specifically talking about today. Just getting an LFO or something or an envelope to sweep through that wavetable provides much more interesting things than just having a stagnant wavetable with its weird, buzzy harmonics just drilling away through your ear holes. So experiment with modulating the wavetable itself, the wavetable position. It's a great way to introduce some movement into your pads.
A lot of you may have heard of Serum, which is a very popular soft synth, has been around for a really long time. But you can also download this free soft synth called Vital and get started exploring wavetable right away. Not right away, I mean, you should finish this video and then do it.
This is a Prophet 12. It's an older synth now, but I just picked mine up last year because Tony Anderson made me do it. First of all, it was my first synth, and anyone who gets rid of their first synth is also a murderer on the side. And I've discovered that it's really incredible for these types of evolving pads that we're talking about. It's also a wavetable synth, but it also can do FM. Which, when I discovered that and figured out it's actually a four-operator FM synth, it really was like, you know, a mind-blowing experience, and it really opened up the synth for sound design.
Now, this brings us to FM, which is one of the weirder types of synthesis. And, uh, you may have heard about how complicated it is, but fortunately, I hate math, so I'm not going to talk about any of that. Okay, I lied. Let's talk about it just ever so slightly. To put it in its simplest terms, in FM synthesis, you basically have oscillators controlling or modulating other oscillators. They're called operators in the FM world, for some reason, but that really doesn't matter because you're modulating oscillators with high audio rates instead of a slow LFO or something. You get really crazy results. It can be really, really unpredictable and get out of hand very fast. And you also have to kind of watch, you know, transposing your patch unintentionally because when you use one oscillator to control another oscillator, it can change the pitch of that first oscillator, and then everything is playing in all kinds of weird, atonal ways. And it, you just have to kind of use it judiciously. When you dial it in precisely with math and stuff, that's when you get like, you know, the DX7 presets, electric piano-like bell-like sounds, you know, piano sound-alikes, maybe those sounds that you associate with FM synthesis. But fortunately for you, I don't care about any of that. That's not what I like to do with FM synthesis at all.
It's really fun to explore the cracks in between all of those right ways to use FM. Instead, I'd rather find weird sweet spots that are slightly disgusting, a little gnarly, uh, but also evolving and have some hair on them, like right on the verge of disintegrating and falling apart entirely, but still usable in a musical sense or a playable sense.
One other thing to note about FM, just as a side note: if you use sine waves, that's kind of the most predictable way to use FM in a musical sense. Once you start getting into using waveforms with more harmonics, like a sawtooth wave, or God forbid, a wavetable, then you can get some really crazy results, and that's worth experimenting with. I've actually discovered some really unique sounds by just trying things.
There's almost nothing better than a great granular. Granular synthesis is a different kind of synthesis entirely. It is dependent upon a sample and it takes that sample and it chops it up into all of these teeny tiny bits of samples that it then sprays across, you know, the stereo field or the frequency spectrum or whatever in various ways. It kind of goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway, that whatever you feed into it, the sample is going to determine what you get out of it. It is incredibly dependent on what what you give it. So something static that just, you know, sustains the same sort of thing and then never does anything else, like, I don't know, let's say a pipe organ. I don't know who would do that sort of thing, but a pipe organ, the sound doesn't really change a whole lot after you play the note and the note sustains until you release it. So you can find some interesting sweet spots with sounds like that. But I found that sounds that have a clear transient, like, I don't know, a piano, for example, are really, really good in granular synthesis. I've also done some stuff like singing into a granular synth and changing the vowel from like O to A and stuff like that, and that works really well because it's evolving over time.
You could also granularize one of your other evolving synth pads, you know, an FM pad or something that you just learned how to make in this very video. Something like Native Instruments' Straylight does granular really well. It's something that I use all the time in the software world. Or you could grab something like Arturia's Pigments, which does pretty much every type of synthesis that I'm talking about today and does it all really well and combines it in unique ways. Uh, Pigments is really good. It's kind of like having the Arp in software. That's that's the Arp. It grew a keyboard. Since some of the demos that you're seeing in this video.
So now we have some really cool ways to make interesting sounding pads that have texture and they evolve over time and they're just fun to listen to. And now we just have the most important part, which is what do I do with them? Pads can take up a lot of space in your track, both harmonically and in terms of the frequency spec that they take up. When we think of pads, we usually think of chords, and when we think of chords, we usually think of groups of giant notes together, big chords. We want our music to sound huge and massive, so obviously the more notes we can cram into a chord, the better it's going to sound, the bigger it's going to be. And the opposite is actually true. The simplest definition for a chord is any group of two or more notes. H. So what if we thinned our chords out to only three notes, and then that allowed more space for, I don't know, the bass or the lead or arps or sequences to happen around that, and everything is a bit more clear?
What if we only use two notes at a time with a pad-like sound on a synth? Well, then we have to figure out like how to write good parts, which is another issue. But you'll notice that everything is really clear. You can hear everything that I want you to hear when I'm only using two notes at a time. You create more space, but then the notes that you do choose to use become more important. And I like to think in this way more linearly. So rather than chord progressions, I think in terms of part writing a lot of the time. And if you want to read more about that or understand that more, I have a free ebook on composition that kind of goes over some of these techniques that I like to use the most. It's down in the description below, and it's free.
You can also have your pads interact with the other elements in a track, like say, some of the more rhythmic elements in a track. If you have rhythmic elements in your track, I don't always have drums in my music, but even something like an arp or something with a transient attack, transient, transient, transient, that's the one. Side-chaining is a common technique in electronic music. You can use it to make more space in your mix so that, I don't know, let's say when a transient hits, the pads, the sustained elements kind of duck out of the way and make room for that. Things were much better from what I remember.
Or you can dial this up for a more creative effect, like you'll often hear in dance music. And that actually serves the purpose of giving your pad some rhythmic element as well. And when you trigger that rhythmic movement with another element that exists within your track, that creates this sort of symbiotic relationship between all of the elements of your track. If you didn't grow up watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, that just means that they work together and play off of each other.
Sometimes it's better to take stuff out than to add more stuff. I think a lot of times for me, I find that to be the case. If you have a track that you started with the pad, which often happens for me because I, I tend to improvise with my pads in a linear sort of fashion, like we talked about, so I'm starting with the pad and then I leave the pad in for the whole track, you start to forget just how much of the frequency range that that pad takes up. It takes a lot of space. So try picking a few moments in the track and muting the pad and see if everything that you've built around that pad starts to kind of spring into action and come to life.
After you've experimented with trying this in a few different places, once you find those right moments, it can really breathe life into the track without you having to go and add a bunch of stuff or create new sections to try to add contrast. Maybe you just need to take this thing out for a few measures. I'm planning an entire video as we speak about subtractive arrangement, as I like to call it, which is this very technique: it's taking things out rather than feeling like we have to cram more stuff into our tracks all the time because that's when things start to get cluttered and a little messy. And if you want to see that, you can subscribe to the channel.
But for today, I hope that this has given you some ideas on how you can use pads more effectively, not only how to spice up how they sound but also how to actually use them in your music because that's why we're here. I also have a bunch of other videos about composition and synthesis and using those two things together. They'll be here for you if you want to check them out. But for now, thanks for watching and get out of here. Go make some pads.