Making Textures From Pads

Pads are useful but frequently they can dominate tracks. Turning them into textural layers or atmospheres can be a powerful antidote to this problem

Pads are an essential part of many genres of electronic music but they can fall flat. For all that they’re great at reinforcing the harmony and chords of a track, they can also suck the life out of a mix if they’re too static. Through the following steps, we’ll see how to convert a basic pad part into something more interesting and textural using just a single other mix element to turn a stock sound into something much more engaging. The benefits are obvious. Not only do we gain valuable mix space, but we’re also building more of a background layer which is unique and to which further atmospheric layers could be added. There are lots of ways of making pad sounds less dull and the following steps should provide some inspiration, bur use your own imagination to think of fresh ideas too – the benefits will be huge.

Finally, we add more effects to the pad channel, after the compressor, to give the sound more atmosphere. We add a grooving delay treatment, a bitcrusher and a ring modulator, whose overtones are also fed the sidechain signal. The pad is more unique now.

We route the kick to an auxiliary buss and use this to duck a compressor on the pad channel. Then we open the synth’s interface and route the kick to the filter’s cutoff frequency and the pitch of all of the oscillators so there is tone and pitch...

We’ve got a track which features just two elements – a kick and a sustained pad. We’re going to turn the kick into a layer which forms a closer, more atmospheric relationship with the pad. In this first clip, the pad and the kick are playing ‘as...