I Made A Pad Pack

Stock presets are great, but I’ve always found them too busy and complicated for my creative needs.

So I made ten super useful custom dynamic presets using Ableton’s Wavetable Synth and stock Ableton Audio Effects.

These pads are designed to be everything you didn’t know you needed in a pad. Because let’s be honest, the pad has a very specific role in most songs, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be dynamic and exciting.

The pads are built with Instrument Rack and use Wavetable and other Ableton stock plugins. You do not need any third-party plugins or external samples to run these pads.

Each pad has 4-6 adjustable macros with a handful of presets to make navigation quicker. Explore the presets below, and catch a couple of videos to sample the flexibility of each patch.

Pad Pack 1

$10.00

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I’ve always found synth presets to be far too complicated and busy for my taste. It’s one of the reasons that I switched to Ableton from Logic years ago. I wanted the simplicity and customization that the DAW gave me. So often, a preset has too many parameters that the main objective is turning enough things off to get a foundational sound.

These presets are in the range of what I would consider extremely functional and useful. They take up the right space for a pad and have the essential parameters mapped to macros and saved in contrasting presets. I’ve taken my experience from crafting custom sounds for live worship, demos, and recording projects and applied them to these ten pads.

View each pad as an instrument with a variety of tones and textures. They each have a range of colors they can create, so you can pick your favorites and tweak them to custom configurations.

Instead of trying to create too many options, I’ve offered ten palettes. Find a few you like, map the macros to your MIDI controller, and explore the sonic shaping.

1. Density Shaper: move between thick and thin textures.

2. Delayed Highs: add an octave swell.

3. Drive Pad: tight textures with mild saturation.

4. Octave Pitch Shift: shimmery layers.

5. Muted Ambience & Sub: dark and color ambiance.

6. Rich Phase: soft modulation to rich ambience.

7. Drive Resonant Pad: thicker overdrive and resonance.

8. Cloudy Color: colorful resonance shaping and spatial processing.

9. Warm & Washy: long decays and customized attack time.

10. Pulse: dial in a pulsing movement to the patch.

You can download Pad 1: Density Shaper below to sample the instrument. Enjoy!