Creating soft pads

[Beachboy]

Hi,

I have a sound designing question and would be very happy if someone could answer that. I know that KVR has a special forum for sound design but the answers there are mostly too general to be useful for me.
I want to create a pad like the one you hear in a song from Schiller called "Der Tag ... Du bist erwacht". You can hear that pad starting at 0:37 (). My questions are:

How could the pad be created in Zebra?
How is it created or played to not sound muddy but just warm?
Do I need good external equipment (or maybe some Uhbiks) to achieve this transparency?
What could be done to have a pad sound not too static?

I'm not a newbie in sound design but I would be happy to get some useful input for such pads.

Thanks,
Andreas

[Polybius]

Weird, Youtube says "the movie is not available in your country"

[Beachboy]

That's really strange! I just put my link into the browser and it worked...
Maybe you find the song when typing "Schiller du bist erwacht" into the search field.

[jupiter8]

I could'nt watch it either but thank good for Spotify.

It's basically a lopassed saw wave. I got in the ballpark in 20 seconds.
Zebra defaults to saw wave so there's a start. Try the different stacking modes (single,dual,qaud,eleven)Insert a lopass filter and turn down the frequency.

Slow attack and release.

I tried some hipass filtering as well and it was good.
Experiment with the different filter types.

For movement you can try small doses of chorus , autopan and or phaser. Not that there is a phaser on that sound but try it out anyways.

[Beachboy]

Thanks jupiter8! Which Zebra filter would you suggest to fit best for the pad used in the mentioned song?
Using a saw wave sounds pretty basic to me, when I create such a pad with a detuned saw wave it never sounds really clear or transparent as it does in electronic songs. Are there other tricks to create a warm and soft synth pad?

[jupiter8]

I only tried briefly and got fairly close. Exact emulations of anything isn't my cup of tea.

Anyways just try the different filters and see which one you like best.

The clarity i believe can be achieved with hipass filters. Depends on your definitions of clarity i guess.

Chorus is always my first choice for soft and warm.
http://kunz.corrupt.ch/?Products:VST_Chorus-60
This is my favourite freeware chorus. I have'nt tried the Uhbik's much so i'm not sure about that one. To me Urs effects are bit restrained and careful. I like brash and bold. We seem to differ a bit there but we seem to have the same taste in synths since Z2 is my favourite synth ever.

[xh3rv]

Are there other tricks to create a warm and soft synth pad?

I think it's worth noting how it's mixed into the track - it's way in the background, pretty sure it's highpassed above a few hundred hz at least. Placed like this, it sort of peeks out from behind other things in the mix (a lot of elements share the same general frequencies, the pad sort of smears them and disappears a bit) which sounds a lot different than it would dry.

There's some moderate reverb on it I think, too - with the right reverb settings I think you can get away with some sharper filter settings for resonance (or drive etc, Z2's filters are a step up in awesome from really generic filters), changing the overall spectral footprint of the sound but not sharpening it too much.

Very subtle LFOs or very gradual envelopes can add movement when mapped to filter cutoff or panning, this is a pretty common thing to do on pads; Zebra2 is really great for finding other interesting parameters to modulate too (e.g. osc waveform or osc FX). For something in the background of the mix like this it's smart, I think, to just do something simple and revisit it when everything else is there.

[Howard]

Are there other tricks to create a warm and soft synth pad?

... Very subtle LFOs or very gradual envelopes can add movement when mapped to filter cutoff or panning, this is a pretty common thing to do on pads

Yep - very important to get those LFO settings right. Before trying anything else, go for subtle and very slow (less than 1Hz) vibrato - the delay/reverb can turn it into the best possible chorus.

[Beachboy]

The LFOs seem to be a necessary modulation to come close to what I am missing. Mostly the subtle things can make a sound come to life I guess. I also downloaded the chorus plugin from jupiter8's suggestion.

Great tips, thanks for helping!
Andreas