How to Make Pads Decay Faster

Joseph wrote in with this question:

Message: I bought you worship patches and installed them. Question - in our worship band - we use a real acoustic piano. I am looking to just use the pads as fillers for the piano. However, the pad by itself doesn't sound right especially when moving chords fast. Any suggestions on how to have them now hold out so long - or what recommendations would you have?

Here’s my response:

I totally get that- I used to have a very similar situation at the church I used to MD at. There’s a couple ways to make them work better together:

1. Obviously, turn off all of the piano sounds so you’re not doubling the piano. Just click on any piano plugins in your template and either mute them or disable them.

2. If you’re doing lots of quick chord changes, pads sometimes can hold on too long (like you mentioned). I’d recommend adjusting the release control on your synths until it releases fast enough for the song you’re working on. Here’s an example of the release knob on Alchemy:

3. The other thing that makes pads hold out is reverb. You can adjust two things to make the reverb decay quicker: the “wet” control and the “decay” control. Here’s the two controls using the Chromaverb plugin- it should be similar across all the reverbs in MainStage:

Hope this helps, and good luck with making music with MainStage!

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