Building my pad

I think that I’m blinding myself by staring at a problem too long, so I thought I’d ask for a few expert opinions.

The goal: a pad, intended to play a similar role to a choral hum, capable of providing both melody and harmony. Thus no super long entries or exits, and also no obnoxious looping artifacts, and at least enough timbral variation over sustain to exhibit more character than, say, an organ’s sustained note.

I could easily take a sine wave, send it through a mild distortion and flanger, and automate some sweeps in the parameters, but I’m not quite satisfied with the result.

Any deep thoughts?

The style of music is more or less ambient, but with rhythmic structure and some tonal complexity to aid construction of subtle musical tension. Picture Brian Eno and Klaus Schulze meeting in a night club and then having a knife fight in very slow motion.

This might help:http://www.renoise.com/tools/padsynth

It says Renoise 2.8.

Will it work with 3.0?

In fact, on general principles, will 2.8 tools work with 3.0?

You can get it to work, but it’ll be a little buggy, and you’ll have to manually mute the spectrum sample it generates when you make a test note.

Use something like 7zip to open the tool, open manifest in a text editor, and increment the API version, save and replace in the directory, then run the tool install again.

Magnificent! There’s so much potential in this that I find myself falling in love with Renoise all over again.