Design Your Own Atmospheric Pad Sound
Last Edited: Nov 30, 2023
Many modern electronic music genres include atmospheric textures as an essential component. They are frequently used to fill space in the track and pushed to the background, although they can also be prominent. When it comes to sound design, they can be manipulated in many different ways. The following tutorial will show you how to create your atmospheric pad sound.
As usual, we'll listen to a short sequence created in SoundBridge: DAW. It contains the majority of a full mix's elements.
We chose Serum by Xfer to create our sound from scratch. This synth has modulation capabilities required for this type of sound. Let's start by loading an instance to a newly created MIDI channel and writing a simple chord progression in the editor.
Atmospheric Pad Sound Design
To start designing our sound, let's first tweak the filter section and engage it to act on oscillator A. Additionally, we're going to need an extended release and sustain. We can set that in the envelope section.
Following that, we can proceed to the oscillator itself. In oscillator A, we will set the octave to +1, select the wavetable preset "Analog BD Sin," and set the wavetable position to around 130. In addition, we will increase the unison number to four and slightly detune it.
Now, it's time to modulate the parameters of oscillator A, which we will do by linking the BEND +/- parameter with LFO 2, as shown in the picture below. Let's set the rate of the LFO to four bars.
We will activate oscillator B and select the "4088" wavetable preset. Let's move the wavetable to around 215 degrees on this one. Now, we will use the LFO 1 to modulate the filter cutoff parameter at a rate of 1/16. Connect the LFO 3 to the oscillator B level and adjust the rate to eight bars.
Once we finish the oscillators' settings and modulation, let's move to Serum's FX section. We have used the Delay, Reverb, and EQ for this type of sound with the settings in the picture below.
Finally, let's hear our atmospheric pad sound solo and then with the other elements of the whole mix.
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