5 Tips To Get Your Pads Right!

beep beep what is up guys my name is Sam world and today for some reason I woke up and I just wanted to make a video about pads they don't get as much love as the leads in the base line we seem to be more like base people nowadays how to play a huge important role in creating atmosphere for certain genres of music as well as some of them tend to be the center of attention of certain songs so today we're gonna discuss some techniques and tips that you can utilize just to get your Pat's to sound better or for you to store in your little bag of tricks and tips learnt from sin to pull them out whenever you need to now usually when I make these kind of videos I like to do a little bit of research and look around to see if there's some other cool tips and techniques besides the ones I have to out to the video but I couldn't find that many so I hope these tips help you guys out and without being said it wants to put my channel you know the deal evil sounds calm guys from my sound descent work best way to support me and let's get straight into making some pads I guess and welcome inside of Ableton now for our first tip we're gonna run into something that I find most people that are beginner to intermediate 2 or just people that don't know much about music theory and just learned how to make chords so most people will say let's make a pad and you know they'll do something here we'll use one of the more overused progressions out there [Music] [Laughter] that sounds good I guess but some people will be like I kind of want it to sound warmer so they'll start to lower it down and it sounds okay now here's the first mistake is that and it sounds okay but just like a piano when you play a piano with these notes so together it sounds sound a bit muddy the reason for that is just having abundance of frequency in the mid lows in the low end it never sounds good so what can you do well the first thing is that you can do the deadmau5 route which you know deadmau5 likes to use a lot of just chords without that middle and that just gives you that nice warm vibe when I take that middle note away the vibe completely changes now let's make sure that we are not eating out the lows usually I have one of these and that just sounds instantly warmer and this is some alive that a lot of people like to have but again they make that mistake with that third node now but there's nothing wrong with the third node it's just an abundance there so let's say for instance that you actually want to have that then you have to create an inversion you have to open voice it so that it doesn't sound so bunched up together and that's how we get that nice signee pad pack called nostalgia there if you want to give it a bit of a tack to make it a traditional pad all right cool so that's the first tip it's just open voicing it's a pretty simple one but I find again people always seem to make that mistake and this works also with pianos if you want a very warm vibe do open voicing or just have the first the Ruth note if it's playing super low and the fifth playing together that their note in the triad of your chord um and it's gonna sound very warm and very amazing and a lot of times you get a vibe that you just look for and any any chord progression you just don't get it a lot of times it's because you're not emphasizing the right notes okay so that it's gonna be the first tip now let's assume that we like this and we want to put a pluck on top of it so for the second tip I did another pad because that part we had was just too friendly it didn't have a lot of highs or mids so let's assume you have this play now the problem usually that happens with pads is that they tend to drown out other sounds because they're just so big they cover a huge frequency spectrum you can definitely level down but let's assume that you just want the path to be loud and you want it to be like mmm what can we do well gladly we can EQ and there's this thing called mid/side eq which most people should know about and if you don't and now you know you can find that inside of Ableton by just going here and switching from stereo to at mid side now what this is gonna do is it's gonna allow this edit here to go from s to M Emma's gonna stand for mid or mono and the center of the mix and s is gonna stand for the stereo now if we hear this pluck without any effects we can kind of hear that it's in the center of the mix however the effects make it wide sound kind of what it's due to the delay now the issues gonna happen is that the Pats are gonna take up frequencies at that pluck is so what can we do well the first thing that we can do is we can use mid/side eq we're gonna target the mid signal because that's where the with a pluck recite it's very important you guys understand the difference between stereo and center once we understand that we can go into em and find the frequency where the pluck just shines the most which is gonna be usually around the 500 to 700 Hertz area so we're gonna boost there and you're gonna see what happens if we have that [Music] it's like just a mess because nothing has space so in order to fix that we just obviously reduce but usually reduce meant there if you have that issue helps [Music] now if we get rid of let's say the delay roll faster so we can hear the cell [Music] you can hear the difference so essentially we're making room for that pluck by utilizing its head EQ now this can work for everything but again this is an issue I see with a lot of people where they have too much pads and whatnot now another issue that's going to happen with Pat sometimes is that when we have let's say like a couple of notes playing like a huge amount so let me put in a MIDI for that [Music] you can kind of hear it's an it's not the cleanest vibe I mean if you're going for that resident vibe cool but a lot of people when they use pads and when you hear it a lot in that can join a deep stuff Yodo and stuff they have such a clean vibe and sometimes just because they're not using as many notes but let's assume that you want to use many notes and what can we do well instantly what I'm gonna do is go in with a pad and just find frequencies that tend to ring not ring but sound resonating they're not resonating frequencies because they're not like the whole time but they can cause a little bit of a strain so we're gonna go in without dition mode and just go into the pack [Music] it's gonna be one we're gonna lower a bit and then there's one more I believe we can in this excuse [Music] we're gonna add a bit of a boost here just to give it a bit of air when I find something that's bad with me and said I never do this to certain things but this boost in air just feels it makes it sound a little bit more open it's mixing engineers and people always say add a bit of air now we're not boosting highs because there's no highs to boost but there's still a bit of space there that we can bring up we're just doing a simple EQ like that [Music] now the next issue I find a lot is that a lot of people will utilize paths and don't like the low end from the pad so they'll leave it and there's nothing wrong with that did you get a really nice vibe from it [Music] the palm is that a lot of times the lower its made wide and it sounds like this now if we mano it we can Center that and it just gives you an instant cleaner [Music] to get an instant cleaner feel feel like you feel when you have that on now another tip for Pat's too as well especially with paths that are gonna be more open and more like present more lush so if you go with heaven is where the heart is I love my name [Music] and one of the things I like to do is I like to put an ozone imager a paths are gonna again cover the whole frequency spectrum so one of the things we can do with them is we can definitely run like an imager on it and click learn [Music] once it's done learning we can audition every frequency and then give it its own space in the stereo image so this is the law in which you can see it's all so we're gonna lower that down a bit so whip this off it's gonna sound like this now with it on you're gonna see that the highs get a little wider and everything starts to take shape in the way that you close your eyes you can imagine little sections [Music] it's a very change like it's very little but it does a lot and I personally always loved doing this to Pat I feel like Pat's or just can be like you can literally put Pat or a good chord progression repeated like 20 times put it on YouTube and call it like chill and people will actually enjoy because it's just very mellow as long as again everything sounds open and it has space that is the biggest thing now this tip might not work for all genres but it will work for the ones where the paths are gonna play a huge role in the way that they're gonna be used in the track [Music] now the next thing is that when it comes down to compression sometimes you might have a pad that slowly opens up and then it gets too out of hand for you and you're too lazy to automate volume and all that so what you can do in that scenario is you can utilize a compressor with a low slow slow slow attack and a very very long release this is gonna be more of a compressor that's gonna add more sustain but it's also gonna team the sound so it doesn't get too out of hand so watch you don't want to overdo it because you are gonna kill dynamics in the pad but enough will give you a good vibe so we're gonna Gilzean certain points it gets a bit louder so we can add that to kind of help us level [Music] - just give it a nice vibe if you ever had it like how do I compress Pat's a lot of people say you shouldn't you should just automate the volume because pads don't really have a lot of dynamics unless that's the way it was programmed what I mean by that is the attack in the decay and the sustain values in these pads sometimes you might find they're a bit too much so that's where a compressor can come into play so what I've done guys now is added another pluck and then we're just gonna play this [Music] so we're just gonna use that other technique we learn just you know make room for the pluck which is gonna be mainly around this area here we're just gonna use that mid/side eq mano [Music] let's add just a base real fast so I'm gonna add a base ship from serum just to saw with a low-pass on it now if we did everything right this pad and this base are gonna get along nicely we're just gonna get rid of some of the low end so we can use another EQ usually people ask why would use to accuse the reason for it it's just sometimes we don't want to mess anything that we did on this side again I'm gonna have to go here sorry for Mike this is my bad words there cuz we're making chill stuff but I'm gonna have to go do this and it just looks too messy for me so that's where another uq will come into play and i feel like there's nothing wrong we're gonna over sample just to be sure [Music] now if I get rid of all the stuff we've done to the pad it's sadly it doesn't really sound that clean so again these are tips that I've I think help a lot I've developed it for myself and su make a lot of music yourself and you do it years by years you'll discover fixes for problems that might arise and you could make your own video on tips everyone can make that guys but this is my solution to a lot of the problems I find most people are gonna run into when using pads and their music the key thing with paths is that they need to add atmosphere but they shouldn't add dirt they shouldn't mix muddy up the mix and the way you fix that is with these tips you control it you tame it you give what it needs but not too much and not the stuff it doesn't and with that you're gonna get something that sounds really smooth really mellow your plugs gonna punch through everything's gonna have space in the mix and it's gonna sound alike mwah oh but that being said guys that is gonna be the end of the video I hope you guys enjoy it I hope these tips help you or anyone out there share the video with friends if they're running into these issues and if you guys have any suggestions so always leave them in the comments guys I love reading them and I love making videos on the stuff that you guys want to learn about so with that being said today I just felt like making a video about pads I hope they help and you guys have a nice day [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Zen World

Views: 38,937

Rating: 4.9327927 out of 5

Keywords: how to master pads, how to mix pads, how to compress pads, how to make anjuna pads, how to make chill pads, how to make edm pads, how to eq pads, how to make trance pads, how to make anjunadeep pads, how to make yotto pads, how to make enamour pads, how to make lane 8 pads, 5 tips to get your pads right, 5 tips for pads, 5 tips, zen world

Id: 2otlt7rI9nY

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 04 2019