Pads (Proto 365)

Our next Proto Club release is the first based on ~vibes~. A couple years ago, we were listening to Tame Impala’s “One More Year” and we were struck by a particular effect used on the vocals, a pads-sounding effect if you will. Taking inspiration from that led us down a whole rabbit hole of different textures, granular rearrangement of those textures, and how the processing order affects harmonic content. The result is something that came to be known around here as “Pads”, and we’re excited to be able to get this one out into the open. If we were forced to ascribe a singular effect type to Pads, it would be “smeared reverb,” but there’s much more going on than just that. A long-decay reverb effect enters a four-voice chorus, with each voice tuned to soften a different harmonic element of a guitar. Once the signal leaves the chorus, it enters a square-wave tremolo that’s also been tuned with a smearing effect. There’s a knob that controls the duty cycle (also known as “on time”) for rhy