Transcription
[Music] [Applause]
Um, let's think about something for a moment. What makes a good pad sound? Is it the gentle rise and fall of a filter? Is it the sweeping modulation of the waveforms? Is it the way the waves guide us inward to capture and extend a tangled vignette of memories into an eternal present? Is it the way the sound carries us beyond our own senses to explore the recesses of our subjective consciousness?
To answer the big questions: What is life? [Music] What is our art but a collective refraction of our own ultimately fleeting existence and expression? Do people really actually like Taco Bell nacho fries? But more importantly, how do we learn to employ the indescribably personal summation of our life and experiences through sound without someone first telling us to punch the like button and hit the bell to join their notification squad before we dive into another six serum tutorial?
Without first talking about today's sponsor, Dollar Shave Shadow VPN. As a YouTuber described by one user as having no idea what he's doing, I feel fully qualified to say that today I'm going to show you how it's done. [Music] [Music]
Okay, howdy doody, buckaroonies! As mentioned in that spicy intro, we're going to be talking about pads today. Rather than doing a specific sound, I wanted to do more of a conceptual breakdown of my approach to designing pad sounds.
In this video, we're going to be talking about pad sounds, obviously, but a lot of these ideas can be applied to just about anything. Because again, we're going to be painting in kind of big broad strokes. I'm going to be using a bunch of different plugins to do this here today, but keep in mind that literally everything I'm about to show you can be done in any DAW with stock plugins. I can't name a DAW offhand that couldn't do what I'm about to show you, so feel free to follow along with whatever tools you would like.
With that, remember that life is a highway, and there is really no wrong answer to any of this. This is just kind of my approach and theory behind it, so feel free to modify these techniques and do whatever you want. If you come up with something cool, feel free to share it with me.
As you probably saw, it's a nice rainy, gloomy day outside, so I figured today would be a great time to film a tutorial about this kind of stuff. This is the patch we're going to be talking about today, but again, we're not really talking settings and recreating. I wanted to talk just about the overall concept to design interesting pads that are super cool and unique and not just like a saw with a low pass that goes blue or whatever.
For this sound today, I'm going to be using Dune 3. This is one of my favorite synths, and I haven't shown it on the channel here in a while. I'm not really sure why, but why I'm going to be using this is because it's multi-timbral, meaning I can play multiple patches or layers at the same time. However, you don't need a synth that's multi-timbral to do this. You could just use a couple instances of your favorite synth stacked together, group them together, and then apply all the post-processing to that group.
So this patch is made up of three layers, and let's talk about the how and the why before we dive into some of the deeper details of the synth patch design.
So this is the first layer. Cool, just kind of a nice dark lower mid-rangey sort of thing. Let's take a listen to layer two. [Music]
Sort of a brighter area, upper mid ranges sort of thing. And then layer three, a very subtle hint of modulated noise to add some space and dimension to things. Once we put all three together, what do we get? [Music]
Lovely. [Music]
So first up, one of the things I would like to instill in your mind when it comes to designing sounds in general is that often the most interesting things are something that is greater than the sum of its parts. We're building up a sound from a couple of different layers, and each of these layers is contributing some kind of specific aspect that complements the other parts of this.
Whether this is designing a kick drum, a bass, a pad, or a lead, whatever it may be, usually there's something good to be done with layering in order to enhance the aspects of a sound you like or build on top of them, rather than trying to make one sound that does it all.
More specific to pad design, though, is the idea of modulation and movement. If I hold a note here for a sort of extended period, think about what you're hearing. [Laughter] And mind you, I'm not touching anything; I'm just holding some notes. [Music]
Do you hear how the sound kind of grows and evolves and changes and never really is static? That is a huge part of interesting sound design, I think. I mean, there are sounds that work really well as static sounds, maybe like an 808 being a prime example. But when it comes to things like leads or some basses or pads especially, we want this constant sense of evolution and movement and unpredictability.
Because oftentimes, the role of a pad is to pad out the arrangement. We're going to have a very broad spectrum sound that's going to fill in a bunch of stuff, and we're going to play long droning notes. It's often going to feed into big delays or washy reverbs or things like that.
The thing with that being, if it's too static, it sounds boring, and it just sounds like it's going on the whole time underneath the mix, rather than something interesting and evolving that adds to the mood and the overall sonic palette and, I guess, mental imagery that your track is going to conjure up.
So modulation is really key for this kind of stuff. More specifically to the synthesizer section here, if we take a look at this first layer, we'll see that we have wavetable oscillators. I find that wavetable synths are really kind of the go-to for pads, at least for me a lot of the time. Wave sequencing synths are another really great thing as well because they provide a very similar benefit.
A lot of the times when we listen to older pad sounds, you know, your kind of classic detuned saws or like a pulse mod square pad or something, you know, they sound a little basic. What the offerings of wavetable synthesizers bring is a lot of cool ideas to the table. We have this constant movement and evolution; we can sweep through the waveforms, we can do lots of different things, and with modern synthesizers, we can blend lots and lots and lots of different things together and get these really, really crazy results.
So I've got oscillator one here as a wavetable. I'm modulating its position. If we go into the mod matrix, I've got this coming from the LFO. So let's hop in there. As you can see here, I've got a fair amount of modulation going on in this synthesizer.
So LFO1 is targeting oscillator 1 and 2's wavetable position. If we hop over to voice two, we've got a very similar story. We've got a wavetable here; we've got a wavetable here. We're moving that around as well using these LFOs. We could blend in the second oscillator a bit. We've got LFO3 targeting the filter cutoff of all three voices, but I've got different filters, which we'll talk about momentarily.
We've got the MSEGs as well. I've used these to create some basic LFOs, just kind of a triangle LFO using that to target the global pitch of individual layers. That way, we just get this constant moving, flowing, evolving thing.
When it comes to the individual layers here, one of the big things I'm trying to do, as mentioned, is design complementary things that are going to fill out the spectrum and be something bigger. So on the first layer, as mentioned, we have this kind of low rumbling, grumbling mid-range-ish thing.
Now, in order to complement that, because this is using a low pass filter with a bit of resonance and drive, I wanted to add a bit more upper mids and air. So that's where the second layer comes in. If we take a look at this, this is a band pass with high resonance and some filter envelope. The first layer doesn't have any envelope to the filter; it's just being moved by the LFO.
So this is receiving similar yet different modulation. I've got a very long filter envelope here that closes back off, long attack, decay, and release phases. Similarly, on the first layer, the amp envelope is very long, long, long stuff. I have a different amp envelope here on the second layer so that these layers aren't really too similar.
There are different movements but similar things, and that's an important concept. This is a pretty restricted filter, so it's 24 decibels per octave band pass. We're moving this around, and that's going to create this kind of mid-range to high-end layer.
Layering those together, if we bring in our first layer underneath, we've got something that feels like one sound. It's very unified, but it's two very different ideas that come together and form something that is bigger than the sum of its parts.
For a final bit of enhancement, I usually like to add some kind of noise or something to my synth pad. So if we go into layer three here, this oscillator is actually entirely disabled, but I have the slightest hint of noise, I think only about six percent, and that is being modulated with the LFO.
So LFO1 is targeting noise volume by 15. I think that's percent maybe, and that's only going to this voice. So this is high pass noise, band pass 12 decibels per octave, fair amount of resonance, not really anything going on with the filter envelope. This is just being moved around from the LFO, so this is coming from LFO3.
All of these LFOs, as well, a thing to note is that these are incredibly slow. I mean, a fraction of a fraction of a cycle per second. So this noise is almost imperceptible in the grand scheme of things, but when we put it in, it really brings together this whole [Music] sound.
You can barely hear it there, but it really starts to add something else and an extra dimension to this whole patch. So again, the big thing here being that all of these layers, if we flick through, you'll see the filter envelope, amp envelope, all that kind of stuff, subtle, subtle tweaks that apply to these differently but similarly within the synth.
Another thing I like to add is just a bit of extra movement. I've got some distortion here for some character, which we're going to talk about in a moment, a phaser, and a chorus. Those are two time-based effects that have this really nice modulating movement. Both of these are very, very slow and subtle, and that's really all that's going on here.
Now, this is great and all, but it really doesn't sound like our final result. How do we get there? First up, I need to add some kind of big reverb, as I'm sure you would expect. So I've got Spaced Out here from Baby Audio, a relatively new plugin, absolutely fantastic for this kind of stuff. If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend checking this one out.
It's got this outer space algorithm that is huge and expansive. It's got a built-in delay with multiple taps, so we can get these really interesting intricate evolving textures from it. But the cool thing is in this space XY controller, there are different effects applied to the reverb.
So we've got lush here, which is kind of this modulated sort of like trippy reverb effect. There's a flanger, phaser, flanger, and then a really modulated, I believe, multi-voice chorus effect going on there. This is almost entirely wet. That's another thing to note; this is like 90 percent wet, and that's really where we start to get this expansive washing pad.
Now, a lot of the times, I think this is where most people stop, and this is where we're going to get more into the heady, spacey side of sound design and talk a bit more about the big boy concepts. So let's strap on our big boy pants and dive into a little bit of the philosophy side of sound design here.
One of the things I briefly mentioned was this distortion. So I've added a subtle bit of distortion here, and this is where we're going to start to drift into the philosophical side of sound. One of the other things I've added is the MSEGs, which, as mentioned, I turned into really slow gentle triangle LFOs modulating the fine-tuning of layers one and two.
So we get this constant detuning movement. This, combined with the distortion, begins to add this sense of nostalgia. I guess if you think of artists like Boards of Canada, Carbon-Based Life Forms, or really any kind of ambient thing, you know, Brian Eno, Tim Hecker, whatever, a lot of this stuff plays on these feelings of nostalgia and longing and memory and whatever.
So we want to try and build on that. When we think of these things, what do we think of? We might think of something like old Polaroid pictures, old home movies, you know, things that are dusty, grimy, a little faint, a little saturated, a little colorful, a little desaturated, a little low contrast, a little hazy.
These are things we can start to implement with things like distortion and other kinds of subtle tweaks and color processing units. That's why I've added some good filter drive here. I think little bits of saturation go a long way, as well as choosing the right reverb. I think this is also a very big part of the correct way to approach some of these big washy pads.
Different reverbs have very different results, as I'm sure you know. So try experimenting with some of the reverbs you own to see which one gives the character to the sound that you're looking for. So in this case, Spaced Out does a really good job.
Another really excellent reverb that's actually totally free is Valhalla Supermassive. If I run this pad into this [Music] a little bit more airy, maybe a bit more moody. [Music]
Ghostly. [Music]
Kind of dreamy, though cosmic in a way. So these are things that I think you should really keep in mind when you're approaching your sounds: What am I using and why, and how is it contributing to the final result and painting the sonic picture that I'm going for?
And trying to imply to the listener what it is I'm trying to get across in the message of my work. Now, on the note of pretentious existential reverb and stuff, we're going to dive a little bit further into some of these ideas and how we can start to paint a sonic picture.
Because right now, we've got a pretty good sound, but maybe one thing about it is that it's relatively linear and traditional. It's a pretty straightforward thing; there's a synth pad going into some really long reverb. Yay us!
Now, we can do a couple of things to really start to excite this and bring it home. One of the first things I like to add a lot of the time is some saturation and some movement. One of my favorite plugins for this lately is Ciao Tape. I love the sound of like warbly, crappy tape, and I do actually like to record some synth pads onto my crappy tape cassette that my wife got me and then bring them back in and play that.
But this honestly gives pretty similar results, and it's free and way easier to do. So I just use the gritty two preset here. But one of the things we've got going on in here is some movement with the wow and flutter. So we can start to bring this in, and it starts to add this pitch warble and stuff.
It adds the saturation and grit and breaks things up and adds this little bit of kind of sonic compression and glue to the whole thing, and this really starts to sell the sound. We can start enhancing this a little bit more because, again, what we're going for here with these big ambient washy space pads is just that sense of overwhelmingly expansive sounds and, you know, nostalgia and whatever—fear, loathing, love, loss, you know, that kind of stuff.
Once we start introducing some inconsistencies and that little bit of character, things really start to come together a bit. But we can take this a bit further. Another plugin I've used here to start building off of this is Super VHS. I'm adding some heat, so even more distortion and drift, which is even more pitch warble with this.
By combining different saturators, we get different kinds of colors and textures to the sound, and now it's really starting to come to life. [Music]
But we could maybe take this a little bit further because still [Music] we've got sort of a plain sound going on. It's not quite that exciting yet. We can maybe use some of that sparkly grit and texture because we've got a digital sound that we've warmed up and added some modulation to, but it's not quite there yet.
It doesn't have that sense of liveliness to it. So I'm going to use a couple of extra things for that. Here, I've got two of my favorite plugins for adding texture to stuff. One of my first ones is Bad Tape from Denise. As you probably know, I'm a huge fan of this plugin, but it's got this harm control, which is like a bit crushing thing, I believe, and it adds this kind of nice crispy grittiness to the top end of a sound.
I've also added some hiss, which is kind of emulated tape hiss and whatnot, even more wow and shake, which is that tape warble and wobble. I can control the amount of saturation; maybe we could increase this slightly. The color kind of biases it maybe towards the higher end of the spectrum versus the lower end of the spectrum. It's kind of like a timbral filter in a way.
So I'm going to bias this to be a bit more on the bright side, and the speed here just slows down the amount of warble and wobble. So with that brought in, you'll start to hear [Music] a bit of crispiness. [Music]
Make it a bit more obvious. Then over here, I've got Hornet Corrosion, which is essentially equivalent to Ableton's erosion effect in a way. A very cheap plugin; love this for, again, adding this little bit of grit.
So this is some band pass noise at about 3k we're going to bring in here, and this is really going to start to grip things up. We could switch to analog mode, which had some nice breakup—maybe a bit obvious, though. Take that off, turn this down, turn this down a little bit, and now we've built out something that's pretty interesting.
One final thing, though, that's worth trying in some cases is something like this, which is more or less a version of OTT. This is just a very subtle version of it, and I'm using this as an expander to lift up all of those little details.
Now, why this is, is because between the notes we play, we have just the tales of what once was, just the ultimate kind of sonic pad texture. It's just the decaying reverb tails, and as we play these longer phrases, as you often do in these more ambient types of productions and whatnot, or an intro or whatever, we can bring out some interesting subtleties and just let that decay.
But it lifts up all these cool little details, and I'm doing this after the reverb. [Music]
And that, I think, sums up a pretty decent way to go about making your pads a bit more interesting. There are a lot of things you could do from here. You could take maybe some recordings of rain or whatever. I just did a bunch of nice recordings of rain here today. I could put those in the mix really low and play this around it.
Because to me, and this kind of develops into the probably next question you might have being where do we take this? You know, this is great and all, but it's not completed yet, and that would be more of the artistic interpretation.
But to me, this sound, it's very cold. It's calm, though. It's kind of like a storm off in the distance in a way. So, you know, we could layer in some rain, maybe some walking on some crunching leaves, really gently play out our chords, and start bringing in a soft piano or a sine pluck or some really subtle glitchy drums or whatever you would want to do.
But the idea being we build something, and we add to it. We contribute to it by adding texture and things that enhance the vibe we want to instill in the listener, and we start building the sonic world of the track around that.
So this is very cold, maybe a bit digital, as I mentioned, so it would probably be well suited to something that has maybe a bit more of a metallic edge to it. You know, some sharp shuffling percussion, a nice warm low bass to kind of contrast the rather cold edges of this pad and whatnot.
From there, just keep developing the idea based on, you know, what we're going for. Is it a slow sound? You know, is it a smooth kind of evolving thing? Is it maybe a bit more brittle and aggressive and demands some jarring occasional hits of noise or whatever?
From here, it's really up to you in whatever direction you want to take it. But the big takeaway, I hope, is that, you know, whenever you're developing a sound, you should try and let it speak, and then you should do everything you can to serve that sound to get the best results you can.
This is a very simple thing. You know, we've got a couple of wavetables with some movement, a couple of different filters, and with just a handful of effects, we've taken a kind of boring, I guess, traditional synth pad sound, being this [Music] which I'm sure is very similar to something you've created many, many times.
With just a little bit of processing, we've taken it to something that's much more interesting. [Music]
But beyond that, with only wavetables and some basic effects, we've created a sound that tells a story and paints a picture and demands your attention and allows you to interpret it however you want. You know, however this sound feels to you is going to be subjective to you.
I think that's a broad story for a lot of sounds. The way you pick and choose your elements and blend them together and allow them to contrast or complement each other starts to tell a story that only your listener could ever know or understand.
I think that's a really interesting and pretty powerful idea, and I think that's that. I hope that this was an interesting video. I hope that this maybe gave you some ideas, and I hope that this inspires you to get out there and make something awesome.
If you enjoyed the video, feel free to leave a like down below so that we can do more sick serum tutorial 101 dubstep bases, friends. And I guess let me know your tips and ideas down in the comments. What do you do to make a sound interesting?
That does it for this one, so I hope you have a great rest of your day, and I hope you learned something. Be sure to like and subscribe, and, uh, yeah, I will see you guys again soon. [Music]