Design Ambient Warm Chords

Although NI Razor is often used to create big bass sounds and weird morphing effects, its clean and defined sound also lends itself great for making pads and chords. This week we are making some very nice chord sounds!

In most cases you want chords to be clean, mainly because they sit in the background of your mix during almost the whole song.

This means that they shouldn’t fight with other instruments.

Razor is great because it doesn’t add any messy frequencies to your chords, what you hear is what you get, and nothing else!

I started of this sound using two oscillators, the pulse to saw oscillator and the number pitchbend.

The number pitchbend is a really cool oscillator because it allows you to choose specific harmonics to quantize to the pitchbend steps.

I chose only the odd harmonics here because that gives the sound a hollow character, again leaving more space for other instruments in the mix.

After that I go through two filters, a normal low-pass and the comb peak filter.

Comb filters are my absolute favorite because they can create some sick sounds, you might have to tweak them for a while though!

The last stage is the effect section where I use Razors great build-in reverb and a F-Grid effect.

The Grid effect, as its name implies, quantizes all the partial frequencies to a frequency grid.

This means the partials are going to be forced inside specific user defined frequencies, giving a very cool sound.

The modulation in this patch is pretty extreme, I didn’t want to use a side-chain signal so that’s why I used LFO 1 to control a lot of parameters inside the synth.

This gives use a cool “pumping’ effect, making sure the chords stay out of the way of the kick and providing us with some extra groove.

After that it is just a matter of taste, I used a few envelopes to create some more movement and set up the macros to automate.

Remember to switch to mode B of Razor if you want to automate the macros!

I hope you’ve learned something, and don’t hesitate to give me some more tutorial ideas!