[J I]

How can I recreate the pad in the intro of this track?

[Jonathan Eppele]

This patch is very interesting. Had to use a few tricks to get it to sound close to what you hear.

Osc: On a subtractive synth, two square waves gives the sound closest to the “Oooh” choir sound which is this patch’s base (tweak the pulse width if you can to see if any small changes improve it. Ideally you could pass a vocal sample through all of the below effects). Transpose one up an octave.

Unison: Two voices, give it a little detune to achieve the pulsating effect in the patch. You may also find that chorus works, with a little mix.

Phaser: This is what jumped out to me the most on this patch. The phaser’s movement is very slow, so if you have the option, set the phaser’s rate to 8/1 (assuming this track has a tempo of 162 BPM). 100% mix. Turn the feedback up pretty high.

Noise: This is crucial, as the noise helps you hear the phaser movement within those highs, even though the oscillators are low-passed (more on that later). You don’t need much noise to hear the movement.

Delay: You can hear the sound echoing subtly, especially if you listen to the phaser effect. 1/4 time, modest mix, low feedback, no spread.

Reverb: 50-50 mix, large room.

Here’s the tricky part that involves some layering:

Pass the square waves through a low pass filter to get rid of the buzzy high end, but pass the noise through an all pass filter (pretty much, no filtering at all). This way you can still hear the phaser in the high end while keeping the sound nice and round.

Hope this helps!