Searing Pads

Download Emu ESI-32 Example
Download Kawai K5 Example

Take a waveform that has only every other odd partial. So you would have the fundamental and the partials, 5, 9, 13, 17, etc. Play around with the amplitudes of the harmonics. The only rule here is that generally the harmonics diminish in amplitude as they get higher.

What you wind up with is a synth bell sound common to digital synths of the 80s.

Now run this waveform through a high pass filter. Have an envelope sweep the filter over a couple seconds. What you get is a searing glistening sound as the envelope sweeps over the harmonics; the higher harmonics fade in before the lower ones. In addition to the filter envelope, have an amplitude envelope fade out the sound over two or more seconds.

As the glistening sound fades out, fade in a second sound representing the bed of the patch. This could be a highly filtered (with a lowpass filter) sawtooth. Maybe route a little vibrato to it. Once you have the envelopes set up, maybe layer the results with a detuned version of itself and/or run it through copious amounts of chorusing.

The results is a kind of glassy pad sound that's really nice. You have to play with the highpass filter a bit so that it doesn't sound harsh.