Dub Tech, Deep Tech and Deep House music have a very similar appeal and share many commonalities when it comes to sound design. This lesson shares how you can make a nice deep tech pad synth to help make your music even more immersive.

We are happy to welcome back Jonny to share some great ideas and techniques for designing a better deep tech pad synth in NI Massive. This easy to follow video tutorial will have your creative juices flowing by the end, and eager to make your own similar sounds. Not only is it full of insights and great sound, the ideas behind some of the modulation assignments can easily be applied to other typs of sounds. The basis for this style of sound design is most definitely the main oscillators producing a balanced chord and the effects used to create the atmospheric qualities. Let’s jump right into this one and see how it’s made.

To start this deep tech pad synth, load a Vulgar wavetable into OSC1, set to run in Formant mode. Next a Sin-Tri wavetable is loaded into OSC2, with the pitch set to 5.00. And a Square-Saw I wavetable is loaded into OSC3, with a pitch value of 8.00. This sound is sent through a Lowpass4 filter loaded into the Filter1 panel. A Modulation Envelope is set up and assigned to control the Cutoff parameter of the Lowpass filter. This same envelope also modulates the Intensity knob of OSC1. The main Amp Envelope is then tweaked a bit to shape the overall delivery of this deep tech pad synth.

Moving on to the effects portion of this sound design session, some White Noise is added to create a more airy character in our deep tech pad synth. Reverb is used to give the sound more space to develop and move around in. A Synced Delay unit is used to extend the sound and provide more depth. A small amount of Vibrato gives us a nice gentle shimmer movement to our sound. The total number of Unison Voices is increased to two on the Voicing tab. The voices are then spread out using the Pan Position feature, making it wider, and the Pitch Cutoff feature, adding gentle phasing.