How to Use Reverb to Create Your Own Pads

Jun 15th in Logic Pro, Production by Ryan Leach

Pads are an extremely useful device for all styles of music, allowing for warm, calming, uplifting, sad, ominous, or even threatening effects. This tutorial shows you one simple way to create your own unique pads.

Creating your own pads is yet another way to help build a custom library and develop a personal voice. And by having more control over the various elements that make up your pad, you have more freedom to add subtle layers of complexity and imperfection for an organic sound.

Author: Ryan Leach

Ryan Leach is an LA based composer, arranger and producer. His music has been heard on NBC, ABC, CBS and MTV, and other credits include additional music for Jerry Bruckheimer's hit series "Cold Case", technical assistance on "The Simpsons Movie", "Bee Movie", and "The Dark Knight", and original compositions for Disney Interactive. He is also co-owner and producer of Short Order Strings.

Create the Reverb Pad Setting

We'll look at three different ways you can use reverb to create a pad, with all three methods using the same settings but unique source sounds. I've chosen Logic's Space Designer but any quality reverb plugin should have the necessary settings, so even if you're on a different sequencer follow along and adjust accordingly.

What we're aiming to create here is something that will take a basic raw sound and turn it into a long, lush and expansive pad. We'll want the sound to be saturated in reverb, with a long tail and a smooth attack.

Adjust Dry/Wet Balance: Typically reverb is used to add a sense of space, depth or fullness to enhance an instrument. This means that usually we want a balance with a majority of the "dry" signal (the original sound) and just a touch of the "wet" signal (the reverb effect). But to create a pad effect, we are not using reverb in this way. We're going to drop the dry signal all the way to 0 and bring wet up to Max. This way we will only be hearing the reverb effect. If we let any dry signal through we would hear the initial attack of our source sound, which could distract from the smooth pad effect we're seeking.
Adjust Length: The default length in Space Designer is 2s, which is not a lot of time for a lush pad to ring out. Choose /4 to divide the sample rate by four, which sets the length to 8s. 8s is enough to give us a nice long decay without feeling like it will never end. Some of you may be concerned that by reducing the sample rate, we're going to end up diminishing the quality of our sound. Although we are technically reducing the maximum bandwidth of the reverb tail, the lush and full effect we're creating will not be hurt by that.
Set init level and attack time: The last settings to adjust are on the Volume Envelope, where we will determine how the pad "speaks". In this case we want it to have a nice slow fade in, so we should set the initial level to 0% and increase the attack time to 2s. You can adjust the time to your own tastes, but I found 2s to be a good length. If the attack is much longer, it will feel like it's taking forever for the pad to speak and becomes difficult to use practically.
Save the setting as a preset: We're going to be using this setting a lot, so save yourself some hassle now and save it as a preset. Name the preset something straightforward like "Long Pad" so you can easily recognize it even if you haven't used the setting in 6 months.

Basic Pad

Our first pad will be created off of a simple wurlitzer chord, which will show you just how easy it is to turn just about anything into a pad. Here's the chord pattern I'm using:

It's worth pointing out that proper spacing and voice leading is just as important here as in any other case, if not more so. The reason being that the reverb effect can make everything very quickly turn into a muddy mess if there are too many notes crammed up against each other. Allowing each pitch a little breathing room will give your pad the wide sense of space it needs. Now all we have to do is apply our reverb setting and there you have it: we've created a pad from a wurlitzer!