If you are solo a worship leader performer and you looking for a cheap
and easy way to add some interest to your sound stay tuned.
Hey everybody, welcome to Mina Studio. I am Nathan Drake and with me as always is my tech director Ronald.
Thank You Ronald. Today we're gonna talk about pads. What they're for, where do you
get them, and how do you use them? A synth pad in general is just a long
droning atmospheric sound that you can produce with a synthesizer. The pads
we're talking about today are already made sound files containing these synth
pads in certain keys that you can play under your music. They're usually an mp3
or AIFF or WAV format, just like a regular music file would be. So what are
pads for? Well in a worship context, they do two important things. The first thing
they do is provide an atmosphere and an interest to our sound and of course this
is not necessary for worship but we're always striving to do our best.
I think pads can help us to sound a little fuller up there. The second thing
they do and I think this is far more important, is they can provide support
for singing. Sometimes when it's just a solo worship leader with a guitar or
piano people don't feel quite as confident in the key as they would with
a full band. Now these pads can provide kind of a low droning key that people
can latch on to. They can latch on to the key they're singing in and they can feel
more confident that they're singing well. We of course as worship leaders always
want to help people to feel confident and comfortable singing to God in a
worship setting. Now I've used pads from three different places and they're all
very good and they kind of have different uses and I'll have the links
to these pads in the description below. The first one is from Karl Verkade. Now
these pads are free to download you can of course donate which I always
encourage you to do if you like them. They're very broad pads. They
have a lot of base and trebel and shimmering kind of in all of them.
An upside and downside is that each pad sounds different from each other. They each
have a unique character which can be really nice or if you're looking for
consistency can be not so nice. The next pads I'd recommend are from GS productions.
I got a four pack, it was a bundle and it had cello pads, organ pads,
shimmer pads, and mellow pads. They all sound really good. The cello pads and the
organ pads are a little more specific in their sound and won't sound great with
all songs but the mellow pads I use all the time in fact they're probably my
most used pad. The shimmer pad sound really good, but just don't work usually
for the style I'm going for but might be really good for some of you guys. These
pads do cost but they're not very expensive so I would go check them out.
The final place I'd recommend pads from is worshiptutorials.com. They have
several different kinds of pads as well and I believe they're around $15 for a
set of pads which is which is really cheap. All you really need to use these
is an old cell phone or iPod or iPad or something like that and a volume pedal.
So plug an 1/8th inch cable into the headphone jack of your phone or iPod or
iPad. Plug the other end of that cable into the input of your volume pedal and
then the output goes out to the sound system. You can make a set list of
all the pads you need to use that week. Play them, and you're ready to go.
These pads are pretty easy to use they're fairly cheap and they're good way to add
some atmosphere and some support to your worship sound. I'd encourage you to go
try them they might not be your thing you might not like you at all and that's
okay. We all have different styles, but at least give them a try and see what you
think. Thank you so much for joining us here at Mina Studio. Ronald would like me to
ask you to subscribe to our channel if you enjoyed this video so that you can
see more tech tips and gear reviews for the small church.