What is a pad?

[brandondrury]

I've had people asking me what a "pad" is so I toss together this quick little sound clip to illustrate it. I was looking for something a bit more spacey. This is a hair on the "brassy" side of the fence, but it's close enough.


Brandon

[richiebee]

I think of a pad as being an unobtrusive sound with a soft attack, and generally just gets used as background filler or padding...

[P.P.T.]

It's the general backgound sound that fills out a track.
It could be anything from an organ holding chords to a rythm guitar to a synth sound.

[garww]

It's one of the four round things on my Yamaha DD. For the keyboard sound pad, I am often using them as a breathing part of rhythm - moody music.

When I head Brandon's I wondered if we started with the same patch : ) Mine is based on a 3rd party Kawai strings patch.

Whoops ! What I attached is just the 3rd party patch(synth) recorded through audio out of the Kawai. My pad in use is this and the MIDI out run through Pentagon and 4 effects for a industrial space sound. The VSTi reads the velocity and touch differently so I get a variation on which is prominent depending on my attack and release.