Goa-Trance style Gated Vocal Pads using Kilohearts Phase Plant
Kilohearts Phase Plant is quickly becoming one of my favourite plugins, today we’re exploring Goa-Trance style Gated Vocal Pads
There are various ways of creating the Gated Vocal Pad sound but often producers default to using a loop or sample and applying a trance gate, while this may generate results, often you have to search for loops and samples in the key of your track or do a lot of editing to get it to fit in.
Creating a synth patch for this sound will allow you to quickly jump in and play it alongside any track, speeding up the creative process.
One of the many reasons that Kilohearts Phase Plant is quickly becoming my favourite plugin is the fact that it has such a vast effects engine built in and incredible sound design capabilities in the generators section.
The “Sampler” generator comes with a ton of built-in samples, even a folder dedicated to vocal “ohs” and “ahs”, which is a great starting point for this sound. The intuitive generator section allows you to layer samples to your heart’s content to create a huge choir effect, or use some Ensemble, Chorus, Reverb or any of the other plethora of effects.
Creating a similar sound with samples and a freeware plugin…
Like I mentioned, you can create a similar Gated Vocal Pad using a loop or sampler track and a freeware plugin called A1-Trigger Gate. The workflow is a bit less seamless and you don’t have as much control over the entire sound compared to Kilohearts Phase Plant (where you can save your entire chain within a plugin preset to recall in any project) but it’s a workaround for those who don’t have the plugin.
Another plus side of the Kilohearts Trance Gate (the one that’s built into Phase Plant) is you can adjust the sequence length to numbers which aren’t the regular 4,8 and 16 to create some really interesting polymetric rhythms.
For an in-depth walkthrough on how to make these sounds, check out the tutorial video here:
[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/PXSCdoIJ56M”]
