This is the second in set of examples of musical structures which sound good despite being well outside of the rules of traditional Western music theory, and revolves around pad sounds.
Pad sounds usually exist (as the name suggests!) to ‘pad-out’ an arrangement, and give it some additional texture and depth. As they’re usually designed to sit behind the main instruments/elements of a track, you can often get away with more abstract textures, created by more complex chords. I can still clearly remember my eureka moment many years ago, when I discovered that really nice pad sounds could be made with a low-pass filtered synth patch, played by a thick, jazzy chord (9th, 11th, etc…).
During 2016 I experimented quite a lot with different ways of making pad sounds, and discovered that you don’t have to limit textures to complex jazz chords… you can use all kinds of diatonic structures and ‘chords’ which are way outside of the bounds of traditional music theory.
The example I’ll use is part of the pad sound I used in ‘Push On‘. I used a couple of different instrument layers to arrive at the final sound, but one of those layers used a preset sound from Spectrasonics Atmosphere. The soloed layer sounds like this…
… and was played using the following ‘chord’…
That’s basically the first 4 intervals of a C major scale played together in consecutive octaves. It’s also miles away from anything that you’d learn from traditional Western music theory (it can actually be ‘played’ by two very comfortably spaced fists on the keyboard!). This is the kind of chord I would never expect to fit into anything but the most avante-garde of music styles (due to preconceived ideas of what harmonies will work), and hence would be very unlikely to try or experiment with when putting a track together. But I discovered last year that you can often use these types of complex and unconventional chords for pads (I used similar and often more complex chords in other tracks I produced in 2016 aswell).
Part of what makes it possible is the use of low-pass filtering in pad instruments. If you were to play the same chord on a loud piano or with an orchestral string patch, the mash of upper harmonics it would produce would sound quite messy and dissonant (like playing the piano with your fist!). But as this patch has a lot of those upper harmonics rolled off, it allows more complex (and traditionally dissonant) sets of intervals to work better together.
Just as a reference, a single note played on the same Atmosphere patch sounds like this (with no high-pass filter and hence more low end)…
When creating pad sounds, it’s worth messing around with complex and unconventional chords and intervals. It often allows you to create much more texturally rich and deep sounds than you could achieve with more traditional chords, but still maintaining consonance in the overall result.
chromaticsabatic 