Pads etc...
i can recommend getting reaktor and the photone ensembe.. there are a lot of awesome pad presets in it u can study and learn of them.. as it's really a bit hard to explainOne of the most important and basic aspects of creating a "pad" sound is the volume/amplitude envelope. Pretty much all synthesizers (hardware or software) allow you to tweak the basic parameters of the amp. envelope such as Attack, Sustain, Decay, Release. A good place to start (and tweak from here) would be to set sustain to 100%, decay to 80%, release to 60-70%.
This will give you your basic "long" sound. Experiment with chords and what have you, and try this with different types of wave forms. This is one of the very first and important steps to creating the sound you are after. You may even already hear it taking shape while experimenting with different waveforms using this method. Experiment with the A-D-S-R settings as well. One other parameter that is really nice to tweak when creating a pad sound is the Attack. If you set it to about 50% and have your release fairly high, your sounds will glide together very nicely when sustaining notes.
Once you establish the basic form, you'll want to start working the details and maybe a bit of processing to the sound. This is where you take the sound from being "generic square wave pad 2" to "really sweet pad sound". There's a lot of suggestions above for doing that. Also experiment with modulation of the waveform via LFOs and pitch changes, etc. Through the right processes, you'll discover some of the best pad sounds you've attempted yet. Just spend some time playing using the above as a starting place.
One other thing - you can use "real" audio to create unique sounds in this respect as well. I'm a big fan of reason and use it for most of my projects. One thing I like to do is load an NN-19 sampler with small fragments of sound and loop them (the forward-backwards loop is nice). Human voice works well for this, especially if you have female singing or something. Apply the same principals as i've described above and you might just find some more great sounds. I do a lot of this stuff for my Direwires project (ambient thing I do... )
Hope that all helps. There's lots of methods i'm sure but after many years of doing this thang, I can assure you that this is the quickest method aside from breaking down and sampling something else
This will give you your basic "long" sound. Experiment with chords and what have you, and try this with different types of wave forms. This is one of the very first and important steps to creating the sound you are after. You may even already hear it taking shape while experimenting with different waveforms using this method. Experiment with the A-D-S-R settings as well. One other parameter that is really nice to tweak when creating a pad sound is the Attack. If you set it to about 50% and have your release fairly high, your sounds will glide together very nicely when sustaining notes.
Once you establish the basic form, you'll want to start working the details and maybe a bit of processing to the sound. This is where you take the sound from being "generic square wave pad 2" to "really sweet pad sound". There's a lot of suggestions above for doing that. Also experiment with modulation of the waveform via LFOs and pitch changes, etc. Through the right processes, you'll discover some of the best pad sounds you've attempted yet. Just spend some time playing using the above as a starting place.
One other thing - you can use "real" audio to create unique sounds in this respect as well. I'm a big fan of reason and use it for most of my projects. One thing I like to do is load an NN-19 sampler with small fragments of sound and loop them (the forward-backwards loop is nice). Human voice works well for this, especially if you have female singing or something. Apply the same principals as i've described above and you might just find some more great sounds. I do a lot of this stuff for my Direwires project (ambient thing I do... )
Hope that all helps. There's lots of methods i'm sure but after many years of doing this thang, I can assure you that this is the quickest method aside from breaking down and sampling something else
I'm fully aware, just say'n - don't sell reason short either. It's not the tool that's limiting, it's the user behind itkenada wrote:the remarks aimed at reason by a reaktor user will make more sense to current reason users once they try reaktor.
spoken by a recent convert from reason to the world of possibilities and rich sound offered by reaktor.
your just going to have to trustme on that
