How to Use Ambient Pads to Improve Your Transitions

One of the best ways to enhance any musical performance is to focus on the space between the songs — the transitions. Focusing on transitions helps you tell a story with your songs, as opposed to just starting and stopping songs. In no setting does this makes more of an impact than in a worship service.
One of the easiest and most common ways to enhance your transitions is to use an ambient pad that plays in the same key as your song. Sometimes called a drone pad, it not only helps with transitions but can also help in many other ways. In this article, we’ll discuss how drone pads can help and how to use them.
Playable Pads vs. Drone Pads
It’s important to clarify terms before we move ahead. Often we use the term “pad” to refer to a type of keyboard patch from either a hardware keyboard or a virtual plug-in that is typically a warm ambient sound. You can play different chords and progressions with your synth pad sound.

In this case, though, we’re discussing “drone pads,” or pads that offer a constant “droning” note (or multiple notes) in the same key. Often these are pre-recorded WAV or MP3 files that can be loaded into a specific pad player app or used in your DAW. You can also create your own pads or create them live with your keyboard. Often they are looped so that you can have a constant “drone” that isn’t tied to a specific length of song or are long samples (10 minutes or more) that can run longer than the length of most songs.
Why Use Them
I mentioned one of the biggest benefits of using pads, which is to help transition between songs. You can keep a constant drone going throughout the transition and start the next song without awkward silence. They are also incredibly beneficial to help with tricky key changes.
If you’re a solo piano player, ambient pads can really help provide an ambience that you can play over so you can focus on playing piano — not trying to also sustain a pad sound.
This is especially helpful as a solo acoustic guitar player. While acoustic guitar is a fantastic rhythmic instrument, it lacks in creating ambience. Play your acoustic guitar alongside a drone pad, and suddenly you’ve elevated your sound.
Pads can also help supplement your sound in moments when you don’t have click and track. If the song ends but you want to have a moment at the end of the song without click, you can use a drone pad to help fill out your sound.
How to Use Drone Pads Live
One of the easiest ways to get started with pads is to use a special “pad player” app like the Pads Live app from Coresound pads or Playback from MultiTracks.com. These apps allow you to load sounds directly on your device, connect to a direct box, and have ambient drone pads to play along with. You can even play them directly from the music app on your phone.
While these are great intro solutions, the real power of drone pads comes in when you use them in your DAW. For instance, you can load them into Ableton Live and pre-program them on your timeline alongside your tracks, or use them spontaneously with a MIDI controller to fade them in/out and change keys.
Check out this tutorial on how you can use Pads in Ableton Live’s arrangement view.

Where to Get Them
There are plenty of options for buying pads that you can use live. Here are a few:

Multitracks.com Coresoundpads.com Worshiptutorials.com

While there’s no end to the number of pad volumes you can buy, one of my favorite things to do is record my own. Source material is endless when it comes to pad sounds. If you add a reverb with the decay increased and a lowpass filter to remove some of the high end, you’ll find almost anything becomes a suitable pad.

You can even create your own pads live in the moment using the hold or freeze function on your reverb or delay plug-in. With your volume turned all the way down, play a single note (typically the tonic of the key you’re in — potentially add the 5th as well). Fade in your volume and trigger the freeze button of your reverb, and now you’ve captured your own drone pad. You can then switch to a piano sound and play along with your new pad.
Improving Transitions
So now that we’ve clarified what ambient drone pads are, why to use them, and how to use them, let’s talk about how they can help improve our transitions. Before we dig in, it’s worth mentioning that a bad transition with a drone pad isn’t a good transition. It’s just a bad transition without silence.
Sometimes it’s easy to think that transitions are just fading pads in and out. While they can help make transitions smoother, it’s still important to remember the fundamentals of a great transition. It should be intentional and try to link songs in similar or relative keys whenever possible (even when it means changing the key of songs to help tie them together.)
Fade In/Out
The easiest way to integrate ambient drone pads to improve your transitions is to trigger a drone pad in the last chorus or outro of your song. As the song is ending and fading out, the pad is fading in. This gives you time to get ready for the next song and prepare to fade in or count in the next song without silence. As your next song starts, you can fade the pad out as the band comes in.
Keep It Rolling
If your songs are in similar or the same keys, keep your pad rolling throughout the entire song. As you get to your next song, the pad keeps going to give you a consistent sound. While this is an incredibly easy implementation, be careful to not overuse it.
We’ve all sat through services where there was a never-ending high-pitch drone through all the songs, announcements, and prayer. While silence can be awkward, intentional silence can be impactful and refreshing. Don’t feel the need to fill every moment with noise.
Transition Keys Easily
While it’s best to try to put songs in the same or similar keys, especially if you want to roll straight from one song to the next, sometimes an odd key change can’t be avoided. In those cases, using drone pads can really come in handy.
As your song is ending, fade in your pad in the original key. As your song ends, fade in the pad in the new key, as you fade out the old key. Once you’ve had a few measures of the new key, you can start the next song.
This can be an incredibly effective way to transition between songs in odd keys.
On the Timeline vs. In the Moment
As I mentioned earlier, if you’re using Pads in Ableton Live, you can drop them on the timeline. This can be really helpful in creating a hands-off experience where your pads automatically fade in and out between songs. This allows you to get your transitions just right, and all you have to do is press play and the transition happens perfectly every time.
There are times, though, when you might want to have pads but no click. Maybe you walk onstage after the message or want to sing the chorus a few times before the click starts. In that case, you should set your pads up like I showed earlier so that you can start and stop pads in any key and fade in and out of sounds separate from the timeline. This allows you to start a pad, play for any length of time, and then start your click/tracks when you’re ready.
If you’re wanting to take your transitions to a whole other level, try using pads. Again, remember to still focus on creating a good transition in the first place, by being intentional and trying to put songs in similar keys, but add in a pad on top of that. You’ll find that extra pad will help as you focus on the space between.
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