Updates and corrections April 2024
Padshop was once a granular synthesiser in Cubase that you’d play with on the odd occasion. Granular synthesis is lovely for pads and waft – host of angels or horror strings are easily achieved. But as an additive synthesiser Padshop2 recreates sharper, more precise sound samples – serving up everything from pianos to Moogs to Foley. It’s a chameleon that borrows and warps sounds drawn from your entire music rig.
The king of additive synthesis as a whole was Alchemy, but that’s a complicated piece of software, and you can’t buy it now except as part of Apple Logic. It also isn’t as good at re-synthesis. If you only want to create additive sounds from scratch without re-synthesis there is Loom 2, Falcon 2 and others.
A good instrument is one that you pick up and get your noise without too much reading of the manual. Additive re-synthesis is complex but Steinberg have made it pretty damn easy to build a useful library in spectral form. Drag in a sound sample – the waveform is drawn up the top. It starts in granular mode – lots of little playback points that you can spill over the waveform, steering them with the knobs ranged around the waveform display.
Click a button top left of the display, which turns blue. Now you’re using the spectral oscillator. The sound will immediately become clearer, more like a wave sample. You can change the pitch, the formant, the amount of in-harmonic elements all very simply to get an accurate sound without needing multi-samples. Because the sound is synthesised the loop points are almost always clean – no clicks. A second layer is available if you want to create a split point, but generally I’ve found a spectral sample can span many octaves and still sound accurate to the source. You might instead use layer 2 for a sub oscillator, in which case granular works best.
Once you have your basic sound there’s a wide range of filters, four LFOs and all the usual elements you would use to alter the sounds on a standard synthesiser. There’s also the formant, purity and inharmonics controls that tame or rough up your sample. Padshop2 soon becomes your go-to for production – imagine having libraries of the sounds made by every device in your studio ready for action in seconds. Imagine being able to take any sound and tweak the purity control to introduce vocoder like pitch, or slow it down to freeze a single frame of audio. It’s very much the promise that sampling never quite delivered now ready for actual music composition.
Spectral sampling has appeared in the latest version of Halion – that would be even more powerful, but the complexity is higher. I also have noticed that loop points can have clicks in Halion, which indicates the two are not quite the same process. I need to look into that further but for the time being will stick with Padshop2.
Behind the Scenes
Beware the labyrinth of Steinberg’s filing system!
By default the patches are stored in
Documents/VST3 Presets/Steinberg Media Technologies/Padshop
They are called name.vstpreset
The samples from which the additive waveforms are sourced are held at
Documents/Steinberg/Padshop/Samples
When you drag a wave file into the interface that will be copied into the base of this directory.
You can have subdirectories in each of these. Because the samples folder is on the system drive I’ve added a ‘junction’ or ‘hard link’ to my big drive. https://www.howtogeek.com/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/
When backing up your Padshop2 files you must copy both of these folders.
MediaBay
The 2.2. update now shows Steinberg’s MediaBay in all DAWs. This organises patches according to multiple attributes – Styles, Moods, Tempo and so on. I have an eccentric view of the sounds I make and none of these can be renamed to suit my temper, so I hide everything but Comments. In those comments I can note it sounds like a ‘Metallic Ostrich Pounce’ and search for that. More usefully I can note it came from my MKS80 or Wasp or whatever. Be careful when re-saving a patch to be in the right subdirectory or you’ll end up with the new patch in the main directory.
Slowly but surely many of my sounds are becoming virtual, reducing a room full of flaky gear into something that creates music. Sure – not every nuance is captured, but often enough it sounds perfect in the mix.