I used to be all about having as little as possible on my pedal board to cut down on noise, but then I started looking at some of the things you can do with the EHX pedals and thought it might be good to have access to some synth sounds without hiring a real synth player. So I bought a POG2, since that seems to be the basis for most of the pad sounds in the effectology videos, it has a relatively small footprint, and it has presets. Organ sounds are not too hard to get out of the pedal, but what I’m really going for is the pad sound from this song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPpDyIJdasg
It seems to be a combination of synth strings and a vocal pad. I find that, by having a little under midway on the dry slider, a tiny bit of -1 octave, about 3/4 up with +1 octave, a little under half for +2 octave, attack all the way up, filter a little above half with the Q on 1, and a hint of detune, I can get pretty close, but I’m still missing the breathy vocal aspect of the pad. When I finally get a reverb, that will help add some space, but until then, all I have is an MXR 10-band EQ and a TC Nova Delay. I was thinking that some sort of slight fuzz might add a breathy sound, but I was hoping someone hear might have some experience they could share. Maybe if I don’t run the dry signal through the filter?