Making A Pad In Ableton Live

Here’s a run down of making a pad from scratch in Ableton live. Ambient pads can be great in all types of music, epically ambient, IDM and techno… In general they want to be long and evolving, thick sounds, with plenty of stereo effects and lots of modulation. You can download the rack we’re making in the Downloads section below.

You can hear the pad we’re making here:

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See also: our other pad guides: Free Ableton Operator Presets: Epic Pads (and rack) Easy Ambient Pads And Techno Drones (with Rack). You can find all the free Ableton presets here including our Ableton Wavetable Presets .

Buy our packs at our Shopify store, use this code for 60% off: SBCOM60STWD

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Tips for makings pads:

Here’s some general tips for makings pads for we get into it below:

• Use long, slow attack envelopes for long evolving sounds
• Use slow LFOs for adding movement with modultio
• Modulate filters – BP and LP are great.
• Use Unison
• Add movement with effects like Chorus and Phasers.
• Add space with reverb, and maybe delay.
• Add stereo width: you can change the phase on LFO effects (like a BP filter) on filters and use phasers for a wide sound.

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How To Make A Pad In Ableton Live

Here I’m going to go step by step through how to make an ambient pad in Ableton live. You can download the rack we’re making in the Downloads section below and there’s a video below too, so you can see what I’m doing as well.

Step 1 – set up Wavetable and a midi clip

I set up a new channel with an instance of Wavetable, the reason I use Wavetable is mainly for the unison it has which is great for pads. Plus, modulating the wavetable effects and positions are great for long evolving page.

I also set up some long midi notes, as I want long pads sound. They play D3 for a bar, then A2 for a bar as you can see in the image below. You really need to play a chord for a pad, but we’ll take care of that in the next step.

Step 2 – make a chord

I set up a midi Chord unit to convert every note I play into a minor chord, which are great for techno and ambient pads. I set the Chord unit to 0, +3 and +7, a standard minor. You could set these up in the piano roll, but I set it up like this so you only need to play single notes and you get a chord.

Tip for making the sound your own: add in your own chord presets as you like, try adding an extra note an octave up (+12)

Step 3 – set up and detune the oscillator

I put all 3 oscillators on, the sub and the two main ones. The two main ones, I set on the Basic Shapes on the triangle wave. This is a fairly simple patch, but it will get thick and nasty quickly with modulations, so I keep it really simple at the start. I set one oscillator up 20cts in tuning and another down -20cts for a thick, detuned sound.

Tip for making the sound your own: change the wavetable types – you want to set the wavetable position at a sweet spot, then set the modulations to move the position around the sweet spot.

Step 4 – add unison

Unison is great for a thick pad sound and there are a few different sounding types of unison in Wavetable. Here I set it to shimmer unison, with 3 voices and the amount as 50%.

Tip for making the sound your own: change the unison type, voice and amount for different ‘thickness’ to the pad.

Step 5 – set up the oscillator effects

The oscillator distortions are great on wavetable for adding harmonics and can be modulated to great effect too. I set both oscillators’ distortions to Classic, I set them up with these settings:

• Oscillator 1: pw0, sync1
• Oscillator 2: pw34, sync10

Tip for making the sound your own: change the effect types and amounts for very different harmonics.

Step 6 – add a filter

I add a low pass filter on Filter 1. I lower it to 1.82khz, which sounds too low but I’ll modulate to open up in the next step……

Step 7 – add movement with modulation

Th modmatrix makes modulation really easy in Wavetable. I set up a slow attack on Envelope 3 and a slow rate on LFO1. Then I set Env3 in the mod matrix to modulate oscillator 1 position, filter frequency then oscillator 1 sync. I set LFO1 to move oscillator 2 position too.

I don’t want all modulations to have the same sources, I want lots of layers of movement so I set up Envelope 2 And LFO 2 with different settings to the others, and use them as modulation sources. I set them both to move Oscillator 2’s PW effect.

Tip for making the sound your own: obviously you can modulate everything differently, but you can also add in a Velocity midi unit before Wavetable and turn the ‘random’ knob up so it outputs random notes, then in Wavetables’ mod matrix make some of the the synth parameters be modulated by velocity. This way you’ll have subtle differences for every note played.

Step 8 – add effects

I add chorus with the Chorus unit in Classic mode, it adds thickness. I add Reverb for space. Then a Drum Buss at the end to accentuate the previous effects. You can see I’ve added a couple of Utility units, which just turns the gain down a bit as it has got loud and started to red line.

Step 9 – go back and add more movement…

The pad sounds good already, but I like to add more movement… So I add an Auto Filter after the Chorus unit, before the Reverb. I set it to Bandpass with a 12 db filter.

At this point it will cut out too much of the sound, which I can’t fix as it does not have a wet/dry mix on the filter. I’ll resolve this issue in a bit, I’m going to process it first….

I add some resonance to the filter and add the LFO in , with a Rate of 2 bars. You can hear the movement it creates.

I then add Phase so the LFO effect becomes stereo and left and right are split and start at different times.

I then add a ping pong delay with an Echo unit. And a Phaser. Both add stereo movement.

As I said a couple of sentences ago, the filter is a bit too much, and I need a wet/dry mix, so I group the filter, Echo and Phaser. Then in the group I add an extra Chain. I don’t put anything in the chain, so it is now the Dry signal. Now you have a Wet and Dry signal and can mix them as you see (or hear!) fit.

I then add an auto filter after the group as there is a bit too much high end frequencies for my liking, and I add a slow LFO to it for even more movement, and I add Phase so the movement is stereo.

Tip for making the sound your own: layer more than one filter in multiple chains in the group for more, thicker layers of swirling filtered sound.

Hope you found this useful and can use it as a starting block for your pads. ou can download the rack we’re making in the Downloads section below and there’s a video below too, so you can see how I set this up.

See also: our other pad guides: Free Ableton Operator Presets: Epic Pads (and rack) Easy Ambient Pads And Techno Drones (with Rack). You can find all the free Ableton presets here including our Ableton Wavetable Presets .

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Making A Pad From Scratch In Ableton Live – Video:

Here’s a video tutorial and run down of the rack on our Youtube channel….

Please subscribe to the youtube if you haven’t yet: youtube.com/@studiobrootle 

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