Authoring a pad

A pad is a slow, sustained bed of sound that fills the space behind a track. It swells in, holds, and evolves while you keep the chord down. A pad is mostly movement, so this build leans hardest on the modulation steps.

Hold a chord for ten seconds while you work. A pad reveals itself over time, and a quick stab tells you nothing about it.

Each control below gets a start value and a range to try, and each entry says what happens when you cross an edge. The ranges come from what the instrument is, not from a survey of our presets. See how to read these tables for what the provenance tags mean.

Voice

• Voice Mode (production convention). A pad is held chords, so the notes must sound together.

Oscillator

• Osc1 Mode (production convention). Wavetable, because the pad's defining gesture is the LFO that walks the table position while the chord holds, and WT Pos exists in no other oscillator mode. Take SuperSaw instead and you get a thicker starting tone for nothing, but the timbre then sits still for as long as you hold the chord, and you have to find the evolution somewhere else.
• Osc1 WT Pos, when Osc1 Mode is Wavetable (production convention). Low in the table, so the LFO below has somewhere to travel upward into. This is a starting point rather than a timbre: on a pad the table position is where the sweep begins, not where it stays. Start near the top and the sweep either runs out of table or has to move downward into the simpler waveforms, which is the less interesting direction.
• Osc2 WT Pos, when Osc1 Mode is Wavetable (production convention). What matters here is the distance from Osc 1's position, not the number itself, which is why the band is the whole table. Two oscillators at the same table position are one thicker oscillator. At different positions they are two timbres, and once the LFO moves them at different speeds the chord evolves in two directions at once. Keep about 30% of the table between the two, wherever you put them; closer than that and the pair is heard as one detuned voice again.
• Osc1 Unison (production convention). Many copies. A pad has no melody to keep in tune and no transient to protect, so it can carry the widest stack of any instrument here.
• Osc1 Detune (acoustic fact). Roughly double what a lead can take. The slow beating between copies is heard as movement rather than as wrong pitch, because there is no melodic line whose tuning the ear is checking. Past about 35 ct even a chord loses its harmony.
• Osc1 Drift (acoustic fact). High by any other instrument's standard. On a chord held for many seconds, drift is what stops the sound freezing into a fixed shape, and there is no transient for it to smear.
• Osc1 Width (production convention). A pad fills the space behind the track, so it is spread as wide as it goes.
• Sub Level (production convention). A pad sits behind the track. A strong sub puts it in the way of the bass, which owns the low end.

The two table positions above are the pad's main oscillator idea, so set them both rather than treating Osc 2 as a copy. Once the LFO in Movement walks them at different speeds, the chord evolves in two directions at once, which is more than twice as interesting as one sweep.

Filter

• Filter Type (production convention). A low-pass with a steep slope. A pad's job is to sit behind the track, and the steeper the slope the more decisively the top of the sound is out of the way of whatever is in front of it. LP12 is the choice if the pad has to be heard as well as felt, and MGLow24 adds the ladder's low-end weight under a chord that is otherwise thin.
• Filter Cutoff, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (production convention). Kept partly closed so the pad stays behind the track. Below about 400 Hz it is a drone with no definition. Past 3000 Hz it competes with the parts in front of it, and a pad that competes is no longer a pad.
• Filter Reso, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (acoustic fact). Low on purpose. A pad's filter moves slowly, and a resonant peak crawling through a held chord whistles at whatever partial it passes. This is why a pad sits near 12% where a lead sits near 30%: a lead's filter moves fast enough that the peak never dwells anywhere long enough to sing.

Amp envelope

The numbers here are unlike any other instrument in this section: whole seconds where a bass uses thousandths.

• Attack (production convention). Whole seconds, where a bass uses thousandths. The chord swells in rather than starting. Below about 0.5 s it stops being a pad and becomes a sustained chord, which is a more forward sound.
• Decay (production convention). Long, so the sound keeps changing shape well after the chord begins.
• Sustain (production convention). A pad holds at full while the chord is down. That is the definition of the instrument.
• Release (production convention). The long release is what makes chords bloom into one another as you change them: the previous chord is still sounding when the next arrives, and that overlap is the sound. It is exactly the behaviour a bass must avoid.

Movement

Movement over the note: back-loaded, still at the attack, growing while the note is held (production convention).

A pad is bought for what it does after the first second. If its movement is already at full strength when the chord lands, the pad has nowhere left to go and the ear stops attending to it within a few seconds. Hold the movement back at note-on and let it arrive, and the same chord keeps revealing itself for as long as it is held.

How to build it: Note Bloom into the timbral target is the slow version, and it is the house mechanism. LFO Delay plus Fade is the cheap version when the movement is a drift rather than a swell.

A pad lives or dies on its movement, so spend most of your effort here.

• LFO1 Rate (production convention). At 0.08 Hz a cycle takes about twelve seconds: slow enough that it is never heard as a wobble, only as a tone that is somehow different now from how it was. Past about 0.2 Hz it starts to pulse, and a pulsing pad reads as an effect.
• LFO2 Rate (production convention). A second slow LFO, deliberately not the same rate as the first and deliberately not a simple fraction of it. It drives Osc 2's table position, so the two oscillators sweep at different speeds and the chord evolves in two directions rather than one. If this matched LFO 1 the two sweeps would move together, the oscillators would stay in step, and the pair would be heard as a single thicker sweep. The mismatch is the feature.
• Note Bloom Rate (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only. The time a held note takes to reach full bloom. Set it shorter than the chord you expect to hold, not equal to it: the ramp is linear from note-on, so a rate matching your hold has delivered only part of the bloom for most of the note and the pad reads as static. At 1.5 s the chord has opened before you have finished playing it, which suits a rhythmic pad that is retriggered often. At 8 s the opening is a slow reveal you only hear on a long sustain, and anything above that stops arriving while anyone is listening. A stab is too short to reach the bloom at any of these settings, which is the point of the control.
• LFO 1 to Osc1 WT Pos (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). The timbre drifts through the table while the chord holds, which is the core evolving gesture of a pad.
• LFO 2 to Osc2 WT Pos (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). The other half of that gesture. Same depth as Osc 1's routing, different LFO, so the second oscillator travels the same distance through its table on its own schedule. Leave this out and Osc 2 is a fixed timbre sitting under a moving one, which is a thicker pad but not a pad that goes anywhere.
• Chord Complexity to Filter Cutoff (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only. Negative darkens the pad as you play denser, more dissonant chords, so a big cluster does not turn harsh. Positive does the opposite and opens the pad up under a busy section.

Use the Sine LFO shape for a smooth drift and the Chaos shape for motion that never repeats. Chaos is the better choice on a long pad, because a regular cycle starts to sound looped once a chord is held for many seconds.

Effects

• Reverb Size (production convention). A large space. There is no transient for the tail to blur, so a pad can take a bigger room than anything else.
• Reverb Mix (production convention). Far more than any other instrument: roughly a third of the sound, against about 10% on a bass.
• Reverb Shimmer (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). A pitch-shifted octave fed back into the tail. It compounds inside the feedback path, so a little goes much further than the control suggests.

Long mode extends the tail past eight seconds. Shimmer feeds a pitch-shifted octave back into it, which lifts the tail and gives pads their sense of height.

Variants

Build the base sound above, then apply the overrides below. Everything not listed stays as it was.

A pad is defined by its swell, so the one variant here removes the very thing that makes the instrument. That is not a contradiction: the swell is the articulation, and the role, a sustained chordal bed behind the track, is unchanged. Only the way the chord speaks has changed.

Gated pad

How the note speaks (articulation). Everything not listed below is unchanged from the base pad. A preset claims this band by declaring "articulation": "gated" in its tags; until it does, the base band still applies to it.

The envelope is a switch, not a shape. A pad's defining gesture is the swell, and this articulation removes it entirely: the chord is simply on while the key is down and gone when it is up. That is not a broken pad, it is the chord-glue sound modern productions reach for, where the harmony has to change cleanly on the beat rather than bloom across it. The role is still a pad's role, a sustained chordal bed sitting behind the track. Only the way it speaks has changed. Keep the movement somewhere else: with no envelope shape at all, a filter LFO is the only thing stopping a held chord from sitting completely still.

• Attack (production convention). Instant. Past about 20 ms the chord no longer lands with the beat that triggered it, and a gated part lives or dies on landing with the beat. This is the exact inverse of the base band, which floors the attack at 0.5 s because anything faster is not a swell.
• Release (production convention). The gate closes. Under about 10 ms the cutoff is abrupt enough to click, because the waveform is chopped mid-cycle. Past about 50 ms the chords start bleeding into one another and the gating, which was the whole point, is gone.
• Osc1 Unison (production convention). The base pad stacks 4 to 8 copies because the detune-chorus is what fills a slow swell out. A gated chord has no swell to fill: the width would only smear the edges of the gate, which are the only edges the sound has. A single voice per oscillator is the honest starting point here.
• Sustain (production convention). A switch has two positions. The base pad already holds near full, but here it is not a preference: anything below about 90% puts a slope into a sound whose whole identity is that it has no slope.
• Decay (production convention). At full sustain the decay segment never runs, so this control is inert and no band can be argued from what you hear. Set it short anyway. The value only becomes audible if someone later brings the sustain down, and at that point a long decay introduces a droop nobody asked for and nobody will think to look for.
• Reverb Size (production convention). The base pad takes the biggest room on the page because a swell has no transient to blur. A gated chord is nothing but transients: the edges of the gate are the sound. A large room smears the chord change across the beat and quietly undoes the gating you built the patch for.
• Reverb Mix (production convention). Same reason, one control down. Around a third of a base pad is reverb; past about 25% here the tail of one chord is still sounding when the next lands, and a gated part that bleeds is just a pad with a fast attack.
• LFO1 Rate (production convention). Several times the base pad's rate. The base band caps out at about 0.2 Hz because past that a pad is heard to pulse, and a pulsing pad reads as an effect. A gated part is already pulsing, so that objection is gone: the filter movement is now free to be fast enough to hear inside a single held chord rather than across a whole section.
• LFO 1 to Filter Cutoff (production convention). The one routing this articulation cannot do without. The base pad puts its LFO on the wavetable position, which works because the envelope is a slow swell and the timbre has seconds to drift. Take the swell away and that drift has nothing to happen over: the chord is simply on, flat, and then off. This routing is what keeps a held gated chord from sitting completely still. Set it before you judge the variant, because without it the sound is a switch rather than an instrument.