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I need some quite mellow pads, so i need a good pad vst, can anyone tell me of some good ones, ive got a low budget so preferably free! I'm thinking quite minimal sort of burial style background pads...

Cheers

pretty sure most of burial's pads and atmos are samples? try absynth. its not free but its good for sound design. otherwise just experiment and fuck with sounds and samples to the extreme. stretch something,pitch it, reverb, anything you can think of. layer it up and experiment for varied results.

Maybe check out the STS-26.

http://www.hgf-synthesizer.de/

go to a vinyl store get some orchestral/choirs and lowpass them then you have quite a burialistiq padsound

i preffer usin samples rather than a synth to make pads

try fm8 if you have it

cameleon 5000, absynth 3 and 4

can't believe no one's mentioned the classic free synth Crystal

http://www.greenoak.com/crystal/

novation v-station (retail)
synth 1 (free)
abakos (free)
absynth (retail)

I agree the best and most brilliant pad sounds come from a wonderful blend of

A. orchestral samples
B. choir samples (in the same key of course)
C. white noise from a synth

filter the piss out of these and add some nice delay and perhaps a phase or reverb.

I have scooped up a lot of orchestral records from dollar bins in record shops

the beauty of these is they tell you what key the music is in.

but if you need a quick fix for some awesome pads and you know how to sub-group your channels, you can take all of the free synths mentioned above, duplicate your midi track, bus the outputs to the same group channel, and filter that.

happy times

first off, try a program called paulstretch (http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/) to mangle your samples into some drony type pad, for the more musical ones just sample orchestral stuff and lay them over synth oscillators (any synth will do as long as it has a lowpass filter)

for straight synth pads though Absynth and Blue are really nice, crystal is prolly the best free synth for pads though.

edit: forgot vember audio surge for pads, good luck

cheesemachine is free!
crystal 2 is wavetable so you can make some awesome shit in it. I've had great success layering crystal 2 and filtering.

Or whip out the vocoder and timestretch random samples, vodode them with built in synth, and filter. Or use a vocoder with two samples one as carrier one as modulation source and just try filtering and applying effects all over the chain along with time stretching and pitching to see what comes out. you'll find some cool shit.

Also I really like camel space for turning all kinds of source material into strange pads and shit. The random button is my life line.

thetaco wrote:first off, try a program called paulstretch (http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/) to mangle your samples into some drony type pad, for the more musical ones just sample orchestral stuff and lay them over synth oscillators (any synth will do as long as it has a lowpass filter)

for straight synth pads though Absynth and Blue are really nice, crystal is prolly the best free synth for pads though.

edit: forgot vember audio surge for pads, good luck

paulstretch

it's a little pricey, but, Atmosphere is a nice sample/synth instrument for pads and atmospheric sound scapes. worth the price in my opinion, have owned it for about 4 or 5 years and haven't grown tired of it's sounds

Tweakbench do one called padawan that is ok and free. Aside from that pads are something that you can really experiment with, so try anything, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't

absynth (although it is a cpu hog), sytrus, vanguard, FM 8.

all those can do really nice pads and atmos.

you could always go for bare samples too. there are millions of free ones out there.

get googling

one of the baddest all round synths I like is Rob Papens PREDATOR...
This thing is amaizing f'real!

atmosphere

And don't forget. A fuck load of reverb on your pads

Wusik - I think I may buy this when I get paid
http://www.wusik.com/w/index.html

Also cygnus space synth, one of my faves. It's free.
http://www.gearwire.com/cygnus-sf.html

a couple that haven't been mentioned - toxic3, morphine. maxx clasters synths are wicked for pads!