Building ’80s pads in Massive

Synth pads are central to ’70s and ’80s inspired soundtracks but if you’re making one, limit yourself to the parameters actually used in those decades

If you’re drawn to the synth-heavy soundtracks of the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s, the rich, dense synth pads which feature so prominently in most of them are bound to have caught your ear. With so many soft synths now offering complex, forever-evolving programs, it’s easy to forget that the synths which originally produced these sounds were considerably less ‘sophisticated’. If you want to make a comparable sound from scratch, you need to keep things simple. Let’s build a synth pad from scratch in Massive and we’ll soon see that nearly all of the sonic richness comes from basic Oscillator shapes, Detune, simple Filtering, careful Envelope shaping and – cheating slightly – a little sprinkling of effects…

We start with Massive’s default patch. We select Square-Saw II, Sin-Square and Square-Saw I as Oscillator types and detune these to add a broad pitch base. We set up Envelope 1 as a mod source for the Amplifier in each, with a slightly longer Attack time.

We dial in some White Noise and set up twin filters, using 4-pole and 2-pole low-pass filters. These are both slightly modulated by Envelope 2 to give some bite on each note. We modify the main Amp Envelope (4), to provide a slightly softer start to each note.

We set FX1 to Phaser, with a slow Rate, plenty of Feedback and Depth but a subtle Dry/Wet balance. We set FX2 to Reverb with fairly large Size and Density amounts but a dull overall Colour. Again, we favour the Dry signal primarily.