Design Beautiful Chords / Pads With Razor

Learn how to make beautiful chord and pads with NI Razor

Deep inside the heart of NI Razor lives an additive engine that creates clear and almost surgically precise sounds, great for sharp and defined sound design, but don’t be fooled by this, Razor also does a great job at creating warm and lush pads.

We start this sound of by using two pulse to saw oscillators, one of the more “normal” modules inside Razor. After that we insert a low-pass and a comb filter.

Now we can start filtering the sound with some LFO’s or MIDI controllers, choose whatever you like here and try to add as much flexibility to the sound as you can.

We can now smooth out the effect of the modulators by using the ATT, DEC, and DAMP parameters on the left side of the filters.

These handy little knobs will smooth out any fast amplitude changes in the attack and the decay of the modulation. It does this for each partial separately!

The DAMP knob will cause the high frequencies to decay faster, to get a nice warm tone without to much harsh high-end.

The effect I used is a “Reverse” module, which creates a reversed spectrum with lots of partials near the fundamental frequency, the lowest frequency of the sound.

The key of these effects is to experiment, on some sounds some effects won’t work and other times you find the golden combination of oscillator and effect, spend some time with this guys!

One additional thing you can do here is modulate the FX amount with an echoing envelope, be subtle here though because these effects also create some dissonance in the sound. (Which can be a good thing off course!)

After that we add the synced reverb and we got ourselves a sound, and a mighty nice one if I may say so myself!