tectonic
Materia // Hidden Lab
Location: Linköping, Sweden Website: groundmotion.com
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I just wrote quite a long description of how I built my pad sound in the Long Dawn track and I thought I'd share it here too. 
The pad I built in Absynth is made up mainly by six detuned saw oscillators, then all run through filters (bandpass with low Q if I remember correctly) that are at around the same frequencies, but not quite (centered at 1000 Hz, 1500 Hz and 2000 Hz I think they were). Then it all runs through a slight waveshaper (sine waveform, or even triangle, doesn't affect the sound too much, just a tad bit) and goes on to a highly resonant lowpass filter. After that I used the wonderful Pipe effect in Absynth and automated the parameters of that one with LFOs.
After that it's just a matter of drawing envelopes for all kind of parameters - this is the strength of Absynth as a pad machine - slight drifting of pitch of some oscillators, rising pitch at attack and falling pitch at release on some oscillators, filters opening and varying, long amp attack and release and so on. Just experiment and remember to use all LFOs as well.  Then you end up with a nice sound you go to the MIDI programming part of Absynth and connect some controller (I chose CC1 (Modulation Wheel) and let it control some nice parameters in nice amounts - in my sound it controls the lowpass filter cutoff as well as maybe one of the bandpass filters for some movement, also it controls FM index/balance and maybe also another parameter which I can't remember right now (writing this from memory  ).
I should add also that I added some sine modulation of oscillator 1 with a multiplier of 4 and automated it with the LFOs as well (or maybe with CC1, I am not entirely sure, maybe this is the parameter I was forgetting the previous paragraph  ).
Finally, automate panning with LFOs and you've got a nice moving sound!
In the sequencer I automated a long sweep with CC1 to open up the pad slowly over something like 64 bars, and then closing it slowly again - this makes for interesting resonant peaks and squeals along the way.
Also I should mention that during the whole track the Absynth pad is layered with a pitched-down sample from an industrial plant  for extra texture and ambience.
Finally, I added the obvious stereo reverb and stereo delay to the sound at mixdown, for added movement and size. 
Plus you can't do wrong with some tube saturation even on a sound like this, so I used that as well on the insert channel. 
Well, that kind of concludes it all! Hope you find this description useful.
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Dogs On Acid > The Grid > Synthesizing pads
Synthesizing pads
03-26-2003 07:10 PM
