Create the perfect fifths pad
This month, we explore one of the most identifiable pad sounds around. Dave Gale gets his fifths and ninths in order…
Dave Gale
#25
Dave Gale is an Emmy award-winning media composer, producer and orchestrator, with an enormous passion for synthesisers, in all their forms. His varied composing style embraces everything from full orchestral and hybrid scoring, to fully electronic scores, employing synths wherever possible. He also happens to own some of the finest synths in existence but we’re not jealous, OK?
Let’s face it, synthesisers were made for pad sounds (except for the ones that were also made for bass, lead or any other sound) – the march of the synth pad is pretty undeniable, and relatively unstoppable. As early synthesisers developed, it didn’t take very long for programmers to notice that you could create pretty cool effects by detuning a second oscillator, to play in harmony against the first oscillator.
There are many examples of this in music which exploit early synth technology, but in 1991, a track from the first album by Seal, seemed to bring this concept into a digital age. We say digital, because the wholly identifiable sound used on the track Violet, which brings Seal’s first album to a close, emanates from the patch called Soundtrack, found on the Roland D-50. Apart from the slightly glistening nature of the sound, which was de rigueur in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it’s the playing of a single note that produced an open chord, known as a perfect fifth.