09/03/2025
I’ve always found synth presets to be far too complicated and busy for my taste. It’s one of the reasons that I switched to Ableton from Logic years ago. I wanted the simplicity and customization that the DAW gave me. So often, a preset has too many parameters that the main objective is turning enough things off to get a foundational sound.
These presets are in the range of what I would consider extremely functional and useful. They take up the right space for a pad and have the essential parameters mapped to macros and saved in contrasting presets. I’ve taken my experience from crafting custom sounds for live worship, demos, and recording projects and applied them to these ten pads.
View each pad as an instrument with a variety of tones and textures. They each have a range of colors they can create, so you can pick your favorites and tweak them to custom configurations.
Instead of trying to create too many options, I’ve offered ten palettes. Find a few you like, map the macros to your MIDI controller, and explore the sonic shaping.
I made ten super useful custom dynamic presets using Ableton’s Wavetable Synth and stock Ableton Audio Effects. These pads are designed to be everything you didn’t know you needed in a pad. Because let’s be honest, the pad has a very specific role in most songs, but that doesn’t mean it can....
