Synth Pads are often the mix glue we turn to and they’re incredibly helpful in a wide variety of musical contexts. But - my word - they can take up lots of mix space if they’re just left to their own devices. This week, I’m going to show you a few ways that you can bring your Pads to life. Firstly, we’ll deliberately get ourselves into trouble by copying a single Pad sound to two others. We’ll start our Pad-warping journey within Alchemy, looking at the parameter snapshots available via the Perform pads.
Then, we’ll Track Stack the Pads and Gate them, to introduce some rhythmical life. And then, to make matters even more interesting, we’ll add a side-chained Compressor, triggered by a separate beat loop. Jon Hopkins… here’s looking at you, kid.
00:00 Intro: A heavenly Pad
00:38 The pros and cons of Pads
01:32 Recording Pad 1
02:21 Quantize and Dynamic Control
02:56 Duplicating part to two more Pads
04:35 Pad soup
05:28 Alchemy Performance Pad
07:24 Automating Pad movement
09:23 Automating pads 2 and 3
11:39 Creating a Summing Stack for the Pads
12:19 Creating a Gated Trigger track
15:42 Choosing Quantize carefully
16:20 ‘Muting’ the Hi-Hats
17:53 Automating Gate Release
19:47 Copying Automation data
20:28 Putting Pads into musical context
21:42 Adding spatial FX to the Pads
22:32 Routing the Beat Loop to a Pad Compressor
25:44 With Mastering Assistant
26:50 Summary