The stab is a very common element in all forms of dance music. It can range from very short and plucky (as often heard in more techy genres) to wide open and drowned in reverb (think deeper vibes like deep house & dub techno). Have a listen to these examples of some very different stabs:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stabs can be made from anything, simply by shaping the envelope of the sound. They often come in your sound packs as finished one-shots and loops that you can throw into your mix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if you want to become a pro, you’ll have to learn to create your own chord stabs. By creating your own patches you gain a ton of options for manipulating the sound and breathing life into your productions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today we will show you how to create a lush chord stab in Sylenth1. You can follow along if you happen to own this synth plugin, but the settings that we use can easily be dialed into most other subtractive synths, provided you have a good understanding of how they work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We need to start by synthesizing a sound and playing it as a chord. Our major first decision is how we want to trigger that chord. There are two options; we can simply write a chord in midi and loop it. Alternatively, we can also take the three pitch values that make up our chord and assign them to the individual oscillators in our synth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We’ve opted for the second method here. One big advantage with this type of patch is that you can easily play all your minor chords simply by pressing only the root note on the piano roll. The downside is that if we want to play a major chord, we have to adjust the pitch values of the oscillators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n