# The Drone, Texture, Pad and Soundscape Design thread



## enCiphered (Sep 25, 2017)

I love drones and textures, atmospheric pads and evolving soundscapes and all the ambient, melodic, tonal or atonal modulating stuff that generates celestial or dark soundbeds, which blend perfectly with the structure of our compositions.

Lets share our workflows of sound design in this regard!

To keep it simple and clear and to avoid redundant discussions about which is the ultimate plugin for making a good pad or soundscape, I think the best way would be one specific workflow per post with a synth or plugin of your choice and a short description.

To create a sophisticated sound design level it would be cool if its not only about how to make a simple, static pad but rather what you are doing to breath life, pulse and motion into it.

And please don´t post any Youtube tutorials here!


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## enCiphered (Sep 25, 2017)

One of my favourite approaches to design a pulsating and ambient drone is resynthesis with a wavetable softsynth like Serum.

I take a sound effect with short attack time and a rich frequency spectrum or any of my samples with similar sound characteristics and try to pitch it up to 3 octaves down.
The next steps are looping the file and set random position and direction to keep the sound moving all the time.
This makes it sound dark and agressive. With the formant I now start to smooth the transients and transform the sound into an ambient, soothing and airy bed. 
Finally I send everything through a good convolution reverb with a proper impulse response.

This kind of sounds are good for the suspense and science-fiction genre but also for meditation and ambient music.


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## synthpunk (Sep 25, 2017)

Using a piece or fragment of an acoustic sound and evolving it through effects is something I use quite often. eDNA is a very good tool for this.

Granular synthesis is the other tool that I often use. I hoped that Omni2 might become my main tool for this but I still end up relying on Granite which seems to do it best to my ears.

One other thing I often use is the original drone?, a Shruthi box or pump organ sample manipulated in some way. The VRAL Evo in Tundra is just phenomenal for this.

PS just one other note, I could see why you placed this thread here but it might gain a little more traffic by using the dedicated synth forum that we have here...
https://vi-control.net/community/forums/virtual-synths-omnisphere-u-he-reaktor-etc.131/


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## gsilbers (Sep 25, 2017)

the new logic time stretch option is very good for this. you can stretch forever any sound with the flex tool. add some cool reverb and its great. 
also experimenting with convolution plugins (or reverbs you can add any wav) is a great option.


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## Greg (Sep 25, 2017)

The drone master - http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/

Secret tip: Play melodic staccato lines in strings or winds then stretch them to hell to create amazing moving harmonies for your drones.


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## nordicguy (Sep 25, 2017)

Greg said:


> The drone master - http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/
> 
> Secret tip: Play melodic staccato lines in strings or winds then stretch them to hell to create amazing moving harmonies for your drones.


Here's a new version being developed.
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=491115


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