How to make an Ambient pad from scratch

Pads are a staple of Ambient music – it would be criminal not to make one from scratch! Here’s how…

01 > Start from an initialised patch. Choose a triangle on osc1 and a square on osc2. Add a little detune and filter down using a low-pass filter for a darker sound. Tweak the amp and filter envelopes for a soft attack and long release.

02 > Balance the filter cutoff, resonance and envelope settings together. Add in an airy-sounding digital/PCM wave and add some long release on the amp/filter envelopes to flatter the analogue layer. Tweak the volume between the analogue/digital layers to taste. Add white noise for some gritty texture.

03 > Add another digital layer; this time a flutey/ breathy sample. Balance volume to taste. Add a touch of portamento. Dial in a sample & hold wave on an LFO and send to the filter at a medium rate. Tweak ‘fade in’ time for smoothness.

04 > Now add some reverb across the pad to add space and depth. Add some delay too (if desired). Choose a reverb which has a long/warm tail and which becomes part of the sound, rather than sitting on top of it. Balance and tweak to taste.

05 > For extra width, 3D depth and movement, add a subtle chorus effect across the whole pad, then experiment with panning each layer within your pad. Keep the darkest sound down the middle of the mix, with the two brighter/breathy layers panned left and right.

06 Finally, keep tweaking away and ‘massaging’ the sound until it sits exactly as you want. Save your sound, then experiment mapping controllers (such as aftertouch pedal and mod wheel) to control the fading in/out of layers, FX levels, LFO rate (or anything else you fancy!).