A patch for slow, breathing pads

February is grey and slow here, which is the perfect weather for the kind of pad that takes thirty seconds to fully arrive. This month I want to walk you through one I keep coming back to — a single sustained chord that never quite sits still.

The trick is to never let any one voice hold steady. Everything modulates everything, gently.

Signal flow, top to bottom:

• Plaits in its chord model, droning a soft minor 7th — this is the whole harmonic bed.
• Maths channel 1 doing a very slow rise/fall, patched into Plaits' timbre. This is the "breathing."
• Maths channel 4 (slower still, almost a minute per cycle) into the filter cutoff.
• A bit of Mutable Marbles on the t outputs, randomly nudging the morph so no two breaths land the same.
• Out through a long reverb, then a touch of tape wobble.

That's it. No notes are played. You just let it sit and evolve.

Here's about four minutes of it, untouched: demo clip.

If you build a version, I'd genuinely love to hear what you changed. Reply and tell me.

— Wren