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Your First Patch — An Ambient Pad

This tutorial walks you through building a slowly-evolving ambient pad from a single audio sample. By the end you'll understand the core controls on the GRAIN, TEXTURE, MOD, and FX tabs, and you'll have a sound you can save as a user preset.

Time: about 10 minutes.

You'll need: any sustained sound recording — a held piano note, a vocal "ahh", a string drone, or a field recording with a pitched character all work well. A sharp drum hit is a poor choice for this particular recipe; short percussive samples produce rhythmic textures instead of pads.

Step 1 — Load a sample

Drag your audio file onto the waveform display at the top of the Grainulator window. The waveform appears and Grainulator automatically resamples the file to your current session sample rate on a background thread.

Tap the waveform display at the top of the plug-in. The Files browser opens. Navigate to your audio file (iCloud Drive, On My iPad, or any configured cloud provider) and tap it to load.

You should see a stereo waveform drawn across the top of the window and a vertical line marking the current grain spawn position.

Step 2 — Set the grain core

Open the GRAIN tab if it isn't already visible and dial in these starting values in the GRAIN column:

  • Size — set to around 0.3 s (300 ms). Large grains are the foundation of pad sounds: they play back enough of the source that each grain has a recognizable tone, but not so much that you just hear the original sample looping.
  • Density — set to around 20. Enough grains overlap to create a continuous texture without the CPU load of hundreds per second.
  • Pitch — leave at 0 for now. We'll add variation with the MOD tab later.
  • Speed — set to around 0.05. This is the playback speed of the grain reader through the buffer — slow enough that successive grains come from nearly the same point in the sample, which is what makes a pad sound static.
  • Jitter — set to about 0.15. A small amount of random position offset prevents the machine-regularity that pure 20 Hz density would otherwise produce.

Press Play (standalone) or hold a MIDI note (plug-in, Instrument mode) and you should already hear a rough pad-like sound.

Step 3 — Pick a window shape

Switch to the TEXTURE tab. In the Shape column:

  • Set Window Shape to Hanning.

The window is the amplitude envelope applied to every grain. Hanning (a raised-cosine curve) fades each grain in and out smoothly, which is exactly what you want for pad sounds — the fade-in and fade-out eliminate the clicks you would get from abrupt grain starts, and the soft envelope lets adjacent grains blend rather than compete. Try switching to Triangle or Trapezoid for comparison: they sound noticeably more percussive.

Leave Tilt, Curve, and Sides at their defaults for now.

Step 4 — Add motion with modulation

Pads get boring when nothing moves. Switch to the MOD tab and set up one of the five mod lanes:

  • Source — LFO.
  • Dest — Position (grain spawn position).
  • Amount — about 0.15. This is a bipolar depth, so the grain position will drift ±15% of the buffer around the currently-set point.
  • LFO Rate — about 0.1 Hz (one full cycle every 10 seconds).
  • LFO Shape — Sine.

The position of the grains now slowly drifts through the sample over time. Because your sample is a sustained sound rather than a percussive one, the drift sweeps through slightly different timbres (different overtones, slightly different decay characteristics) and adds the organic evolution that a static pad lacks.

Step 5 — Send it through reverb

Switch to the FX tab. In the Reverb section:

  • Mode — Stormy. Of the three reverb modes, Stormy has the longest tail and the most modulated character, which is the ambient-pad default.
  • Size — 0.75. A large virtual space.
  • Damping — 0.4. Some high-frequency absorption so the reverb tail doesn't get harsh.
  • Mix — 0.45. A generous wet amount — ambient pads live and die by their reverb.

If you want to push into washing-drone territory, raise Mix to 0.7 and enable Freeze on the reverb to hold the current tail indefinitely.

Step 6 — Save it as a preset

In the header bar, click the Save button (disk icon next to the preset name). Enter a name — "My First Pad" is traditional — and confirm. The preset file is written to your user presets directory and is now available from the preset browser on any future launch.

What you just learned

  • The four most important grain parameters: Size, Density, Speed, and Position. Every pad recipe starts with these.
  • How window shape changes the character of grains beyond their basic parameters — a Hanning window is smooth, a Trapezoid window is punchy, and the choice matters as much as any knob on GRAIN.
  • How modulation adds movement to an otherwise static patch, and how even a very slow LFO on a single parameter can make a sound feel alive.
  • How reverb mode is more than a tail length — it's a tonal choice, and the Stormy mode sounds different from Misty even at identical Size and Mix values.

Where to go next

  • Read the full GRAIN tab reference to discover every control you didn't touch (including the MORPH column's assignable Macro knob, which is a tutorial of its own).
  • Read the full MOD tab reference — the single lane you set up is one of five, and the rhythmic sources can drive entirely different types of patches.
  • Try the same recipe with a percussive sample (a single drum hit, a snippet of speech, a guitar pluck). The same knob positions will produce a completely different sound, which is the whole point of granular synthesis.