I’d like to step away from the normal affair of looking at synthesizers for mainstream use in this post in favor of focusing on a more obscure, typically enthusiast-only field of sound synthesis: ambient pads. More specifically, I’d like to focus on the power that the Roland V-Synth has for creating such pads.
The Ambience Powerhouse:
Aside from the instrument’s virtual analog section, which we looked at a couple of weeks ago in the blog showing off the real potential of the instrument for analog sounds, the V-Synth also has the capability to play recorded sounds, looped and non-looped. This is actually a quite flexible system, as not only can you load up single-cycle waveforms to have an almost limitless waveform library, but you can also load longer samples for playback. Admittedly, this is not as handy as one might think for sampling in the traditional sense; the V-Synth really doesn’t work well with acoustic samples such as pianos and guitars. For situations where one would want to manipulate and mangle the samples loaded onto the instrument, the V-Synth is a dream though. The instrument has a very powerful resampling engine on-board that, in so many words, allows the user to adjust the time domain and the pitch of a sample independently of each other, which in and of itself is no small feat. This leads to some incredible possibilities for sure, and combining this intense sample mangling with the flexible virtual analog section and the myriad of on-board effects affords this keyboard an astounding ability to make ambient pad sounds.
Let’s Build a Patch:
Rather than just talking about specs though, let’s take a step-by-step look at the construction of a pad sound on the V-Synth. These steps are meant to be followed along with the audio demo at the bottom of the post, and within that clip there are comment sections that describe what step each sound byte is for:
Step 1: First, we will load up a sample. In this case, I’ve loaded a sample I’ve made of wind chimes.
Step 2: With that loaded, we will play with the time domain of the sample until we get a sound we feel is ethereal and fitting of an ambient pad. This serves to show the unique power of this resampling engine.
Step 3: Now having that appropriately tweaked, we will create an envelope character that fades in and fades out fairly slowly. This adds to the pad’s dynamic and lush feel.
Step 4: Let us add a static waveform to the mix now, as this will give us a good foundation of pitch and tone for our pad. We will enable a sine wave on oscillator 2. Consequently, the analog section allows for the use of a sub-oscillator of either -2 octaves, -1 octave or -0 octaves, and allows you to detune said sub-oscillator, so we will use a -0 octave sub-oscillator and detune it slightly to make a rich sweet tone. This oscillator also allows you to adjust the pulse-width setting, and doing so will morph the sine wave into a sawtooth wave and back as it is adjusted, giving further flexibility to this oscillator/waveform combination. Add a slight modulation routing from the LFOs for both oscillators to each oscillator’s respective pitch input, to simulate a sort of lazy drift feeling to the pitch, but be careful to be subtle with it.
Step 5: Now with all of our sound generation elements in place, let’s add a low-pass filter to mellow out the tone a bit. A -24dB should do well; adjust the filter cutoff frequency to a pleasant setting to your ears.
Step 6: The great majority of the pad is in place, it’s now time for effects: enable in the effects chain a pitch-shifter set at pleasing intervals (in this case, +7 semi-tones and -12 semi-tones) at 50:50 wet/dry ratio, followed by a long-decay reverb and a moderate chorus effect, both being set to favor wet over dry signal. This adds further ambience to the sound.
Step 7: Finish the patch by adjusting the levels between oscillator 1 (the chimes) and oscillator 2 (the sine wave) to a pleasant setting. Viola! You now have a deep, rich, big-sounding ambient pad, courtesy of the powerful synth engine with the V-Synth.
Audio Clip:
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