I’m not sure how I feel about it. I find that I am taking what it gives me, more often than me going in and building the pad sound that I desire, based off the imported sample. I’m talking in the sense of traditional droning pads.
It’s very mathematical. It does seem the tremolo is always going to be dependent on the size of the audio sample/number of grains to track and cycle. You would have to be a math genius to do the sort of calculations needed to figure out how to get multiple phases of a moving sample to line up perfectly. Ultimately aren’t we just hearing multiple samples canceling each other out at variable rates?
With Padshop, we can generate vague unpredictable experimental sounds by randomly toying around with imported audio, cross our fingers and hope that we can mangle it into sync with the song, settle for the best you can get after you’re just tired of fiddling, and perhaps while losing focus of the bigger musical picture.
And you can get a good sound that way, I’m not knocking ‘happy accidents’. I guess I was hoping for something a bit different. I won’t go as far to say they dropped the ball, but I imagine a lot of people hear the same potential I do for taking audio and ‘shmearing’ it into a steady sustained pad with that lovely watery Padshop signature sound.
We can’t do that with Padshop.