Thick 'Vocal' Pad Sound

How to make that sound...
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I've always liked a certain sort of very thick vocal pad sound. I can think of three examples of its use. The first is in this track by Air after 1 min 12 secs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxEnv2zi01g
Other examples would be in "I'm Not In Love" by 10CC, or in "Spinning Plates" by Radiohead.

Any thoughts on how to recreate this sound? The Air one has a bit of stereo width. Can you achieve this sound with just detuned oscillators spread across the stereo spectrum to make it 'big', or is it a combination of this and thick reverb? Would love to know if anyone has any ideas.

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As so often, there is no simple answer to achive beautiful complexity.

This is how 10cc went about it...

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/ ... ot-in-love
Lol Creme, keyboard, backing vocals

I’d become obsessed with tape loops after listening to the Beatles’ Revolution 9. Our studio used to do recordings for the Mellotron, a keyboard that played prerecorded notes. Session musicians would come in and do these painstaking recordings for every instrument of an orchestra, one note at a time, so that when they were all played together on a Mellotron it sounded like an orchestra. I was fascinated by this, and wanted to try it with banks and banks of voices.

The whole process took about a week. It was incredibly tedious. Three or four of us had to sing every note about 14 times, then put echo on it, which gave it that luxurious, velvety harmonic sound.

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Layering and spreading of "vocal" or "choir" sounds (synthesized or sampled) in chords will get you on the way. Part of the "airy" feel (bad word joke) is adding high frequency noise/hiss.

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Sampletekk has the actual "I'm Not in Love" recordings remapped as Kontakt instrument.

https://www.sampletekk.com/choir?product_id=171

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There aren't many specialized choir synths. Especially not in the free domain. Here's a classic:

Big Tick - Angelina
https://www.kvraudio.com/product/angelina-by-bigtick

Maybe Angelina will find a new lease of life since his other classic (Cheese Machine, a string machine) has been updated and re-released via https://www.2getheraudio.com.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67zX4qvggPQ

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Thank you everyone. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't going in completely the wrong direction before having a go myself. I'm thinking I might have a go with a granular synth using vocal samples, and detuning and widening. Adding in some noise and then modulating a filter will probably help too. Time to have a play...

Thanks again :)

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Liney wrote: Wed May 27, 2020 1:40 pm I'm thinking I might have a go with a granular synth using vocal samples, and detuning and widening. Adding in some noise and then modulating a filter will probably help too.
A free Granular synth:

Stone Voices - PolyGAS
https://www.kvraudio.com/product/polyga ... one-voices

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