This is the featured image of the Use Pads to Fill Your Track blog article.

Use Pads to Fill Your Track

Last Edited: Oct 31, 2023

One of the most typical challenges for a music producer is creating a track with a sense of lively, genuine depth. Pads are one of the most valuable sounds for this purpose since they have extended notes that can effectively fill the sound spectrum. Keeping this in mind, in the following tutorial, I'll teach you how to use pads to fill your track.

As usual, we'll begin by listening to this short sequence created in our SoundBridge: DAW, which contains most of the entire mix's elements.

This is a screenshot of my mix before I use pads to fill the track.

~Full Mix - Without Pad

As you may have noticed from the audio example above, I purposefully created a basic pattern consisting of a kick drum, bassline, and other rhythm elements. I did this to free up space in the mid-frequency spectrum, which I intend to fill with the pad.

Choose a Suitable Pad Sound

Let us begin by adding a Vital instance where I created a simple pad sound. Here's an example of how it sounds with the basic progression I made for it.

This is a screenshot of my mix and the MIDI editor of the pad sound.

~Pad - Solo (Unprocessed)

~Full Mix - Pad (Unprocessed)

With this pad, we notice that the sound image now gets desired mid-frequencies, but as you can hear, it doesn't fit in the mix as it should. I'll try to fix this by focusing on sound design in the Vital. Pads, in my opinion, should evolve and change throughout the progression. As a result, the first thing I will do is add some movement to it. I'll accomplish this by using two LFOs. One will be in charge of the filter's cutoff embodied in the distortion effect I used in Vital, while the other will be in control of the cutoff of the master filter, which I set to band-pass mode.

This is a screenshot of my mix and the Vital interface showing modulated sections.

~Pad - Solo (Modulation)

Add Effects to Make Your Pads Fill Up Your Track

We've made good progress with the pad, but it could sound better. The following step would be to add effects to it. Chorus will be the first effect I use after distortion in the effect chain. When applied to pad sounds, the Chorus almost always sounds great. In this case, I'll experiment with more-or-less extreme settings, such as a slow sync tempo of 4/1. This produced a nearly flanger-like sound effect.

Because I want to push the overall sound back in the mix, I'll use a delay and reverb effect after the Chorus. Finally, we have an excellent pad sound placed right in the mix. Let us hear it solo, then with other elements of the mix.

This is a screenshot of my mix and the Vital interface showing effect sections.

~Pad - Solo (Modulation + Effects)

~Full Mix - Pad (Final)

If you liked this article about sound design, here are some more on the same subject:

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