Quick & Easy Tutorial Series: Evolving Atmospheric Murmur Pad

In today’s installment of the Quick & Easy Tutorial Series I will demonstrate how to make an evolving atmospheric murmur pad, perfect for ambient, minimal and deepchord style projects.

This is a very simple sound and you can easily change it up to make it into something unique for one of your tracks. It only takes a few mounts to make and provides you with a sound element for your productions that seems to evolve and change over time. Almost all of the settings can be seen in the main image below. There are also a few more images included to show the settings not seen in the main image. You can click on any of these images to get a better look at the settings.

I chose to begin with a Color wavetable assigned loaded onto OSC1, but you can use any one you like. I detuned the pitch slightly, up 0.08.

On the OSC2 panel I loaded up the Melancholia wavetable and dropped just shy of one octave. The difference in pitch between the two oscillators will create a small amount of phasing and therefore the first bit of motion in our sound.

Adjust the main Envelope to allow for a slightly longer attack, up the decay volume and extend the release so it rings out longer.

Next, we will send this through a Lowpass filter and then a Bandpass filter. This will change the sound a bit, as it will be restricting parts of the original frequencies.

Now we will set up the 5LFO tab which we will then assign to the pitch values of both OSC1 and OSC2. This generates even more movement in our sound, which is going to be amplified here in a moment.

We will hen set up the 6LFO tab and assign it to the Resonance parameter of Filter 1 and the Cutoff parameter of Filter 2.

You can add a little noise and insert the murmur element of our atmospheric pad by activating the Noise panel and loading the Murmur preset.

The last step to getting this sound set up it to add Reverb to the FX1 tab and a Synced Delay to the FX2 tab. You can hear this evolving atmospheric murmur pad in the audio example below. And you can hear it in action with some drums in the second example.

I hope you enjoyed this installment of the Quick & Easy Tutorial Series, where I show you how to create useful sounds in just a couple of minutes. If you have a request for a type of sound to be featured, or would like to share one of your own with the rest of the MassiveSynth community, please send us a message letting us know!

Cheers,
OhmLab