Creating Pads and Atmospheres with Kilohearts Phase Plant

Creating Pads and Atmospheres with Kilohearts Phase Plant

Creating Pads and Atmospheres using very simple waveforms with Kilohearts Phase Plant.

One of my favourite ways of creating pads and atmospheres is to create a stack of very simple waveforms and play with the tuning and unison settings to create variations. Kilohearts Phase Plant is particularly awesome for creating these types of sounds, as you can send each of your oscillators through a unique effects chain. This gives you a huge amount of sonic control, especially considering you can load up as many oscillators as you need and stack them up in an additive synthesis manner.

Delay and reverb effects are a go-to for pad and atmosphere type sounds, however, keep in mind there are tons of different effects to choose from within Phase Plant, so you’re not limited to just those.  The Resonator, Formant Filter and Comb Filter are all great effects for these types of sounds.

I also like to apply some slow LFOs to several parameters in the patch, especially the unison settings – it creates a lot of dynamics in that initial movement you created. When using LFOs that aren’t synced, the result is a slight inevitability in the sound.

Cross modulating the oscillators…

Another amazing feature for creating pads and atmospheres with Kilohearts Phase Plant is the cross-modulation capabilities, especially when you’re building your sounds using a stack of simple waveforms. You can send any of the individual oscillators into another one, to use as a modulation source. Sending these to modulate the phase of the oscillators is a great way of adding texture to each layer.

In terms of insert effects on the channel I generally only use a bit of EQ and maybe LFOtool to give it a bit of a pumping effect, other than that most of the effects are done inside the plugin.

For a walkthrough on these techniques, check out the video tutorial here: