Creating Pads in Reason 6

[blvedream]

Hello. So the last few weeks this has been especially bothering me. I'm trying to create more pad/atmospheric sounds to add emotion and texture to my tracks. The problem is that i'm awful at it, I have no idea where to start with creating something like that and I either end up making something that sounds awful or just sounds the same as my 10 other attempts. It's really frustrating me and putting me in a creative rut, opening up reason 6 and creating something that just sounds horrible and gives me no inspiration to continue.

I was hoping somebody could help point me in the right direction with creating these sounds using either Thor or Malstrom. Some videos or articles would be great, thank you so much!

 

[KonKossKang]

Basic synthesis as a whole man. I remember krushin lecturin me like "zebra makes sense in the manual pdf you gotta know synthesis to see why it do" when I was askin a similar back then.
The rules of synthesis and the methods are universal in nature, there are some that take MANY liberties with it and do something different like synplant.
reason's modules are some of the most straightforward layouts you will see in synths.

Hm... Osc>Filt>Env.
Hm...Modulation, automation.
Hm...Experimentation.

Reason and other daws strengths are the abilities to layer. Especially if they have a modmatrix which in english is just another term for [modulate even more than you normally would]
I have reason 5 and updated to 8 a while back, it took a while gettin used to that new shit lol.
Learn as much of sound design as possible.

The basic pad is just a slightly/moderately lowpassed wave with optional automation/modulation and litle bell and whistle effects to exaggerate the sound, as well as getting comfortable with the A.D.S.R module.

 

[SFE_Music]

Getting a good sounding pad is all about movement. By movement, I mean automating filters. I personally have no experience with reason, but the sound design principles are similar across the board. It's just usually such a subtle element that people just load up a nexus instead of actually designing their own shit

I start off with low passing a waveform, like KonKossKang said (This is something additive synths are good at, especially for adding higher pitch details.) I just automate random parameters slightly over time, add some stereo width, saturation, slight vibrato, etc. Until I have something that sounds warm.

Then I use a bandpass filter opening up at the end, but there's really no exact science to sound design. It's all preference, but the key with pads is to keep it simple.