Things get even trickier when you want to take advantage of the benefits of a pad, but at the same time you'd rather the general public didn't notice you were using one, in natural‑sounding acoustic styles or hard‑hitting rock music, for example, neither of which exactly like to brag about their synth chops. While it's not too difficult to design a sustained synth part that makes its presence felt in all these ways, it takes a certain amount of artistry to achieve only a subset of the effects. But there's more to many pads than that: the synth can also appear to increase the sustain of chordal instruments such as rhythm guitars and keyboards, and it can also be used to exaggerate the sense of stereo width in your mix. An important part of the effect is usually in the frequency domain, where the concordant harmonics are capable of filling in spectral gaps and smoothing harshness. What a given pad fills out exactly varies from case to case, though. So what is a pad, exactly? Well, in its basic form it's just a simple chordal keyboard part that follows the chords of your song, its function being to fill out some aspect of the production sonics. Gentle high‑pass filtering from around 300Hz avoids a build‑up of muddiness in the low mid-range, while a fairly narrow 5dB peaking cut recesses the area of the spectrum that the human hearing system is most sensitive to. In this screenshot from 112dB's Redline Equaliser, you can see a typical EQ curve designed to keep a synth pad contained and unobtrusive in the mix. Assuming that you don't want to make boring music, you'd be forgiven for shying away from the third of these, but in fact synth pads can be immensely useful for enhancing studio productions across a surprisingly wide range of different music styles - as long as you create and apply them effectively. Depending on the context, it might be a large rubbery drum‑machine button, a switch that makes your mic preamp less sensitive, or a bunch of boring synth chords.
The word 'pad' can mean a lot of things in the studio. Fluorescent socks, marble‑wash jeans, and naff‑sounding synth pads! You might not want to resurrect the first two, but subtle use of pads can improve even the most contemporary‑sounding mix.
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