Repro-5 Pads for Melodic House: How to Build Classic Poly Pads

Repro-5 pads have a sound I can pick out of a mix in a couple of seconds: a slightly unstable, warm chord that swells in, breathes a little, and never feels sterile. That's the classic Prophet character, and for melodic house it is almost perfect. The problem is that most people load an init patch, open the filter, add a big reverb and wonder why it sounds like a cheap string machine. In this walkthrough I'll show you how I build a poly pad in u-he Repro-5 from scratch, which controls actually matter, and how to get it sitting under a melodic house groove without eating the mix.

Why Repro-5 pads work so well in melodic house

Repro-5 is u-he's recreation of a famous five voice polysynth from 1978, the one most producers simply call the Prophet. u-he extended it to 8 voices, added individual voice panning, per voice detuning and a proper effects section. The architecture is small on purpose: two oscillators, a noise source, one lowpass filter, two envelopes, the Poly Mod section (u-he labels it VOICE MOD) and an LFO that runs through the mod wheel.

That limitation is the reason it works. You can't hide a weak pad behind twenty modulation slots, so you make a few good decisions instead: the waveform mix, how slowly the filter opens, how much the voices drift. In melodic house the pad carries the chords for minutes at a time, so it has to be warm, move a little and stay out of the way.

Step 1: oscillators and mixer

Start from the init patch. Set VOICES to 8 and leave UNISON off. For pads you want every note of the chord to get its own voice, not a stack of voices on one note.

Oscillator A

• Shape: switch on both the sawtooth and the pulse. The manual points out that you can add the shapes together, and saw plus pulse gives you a fuller, slightly hollow tone than either one alone.
• Pulse Width: somewhere around 30 to 40 percent. Exactly 50 percent is a square, which sounds more like a clarinet than a pad.
• Frequency: leave it at the root.

Oscillator B

• Shape: sawtooth only.
• Fine tuning: the FINE trimmer covers plus or minus 20 cents. I usually set it somewhere between 5 and 8 cents away from oscillator A. That slow beating between the two oscillators is where most of the warmth comes from.
• KYBD: keep it on, otherwise oscillator B doesn't follow the keyboard and your chords turn into a drone.

Mixer

Oscillator A a bit louder than oscillator B, and a touch of NOISE, just enough that you hear some air when you solo the pad. Don't push both oscillators to full: the mixer drives the filter, and a hot mixer makes the pad grainy before you've even added effects.

Step 2: the filter is the pad

The lowpass filter is where a Repro-5 pad gets its shape. These are my starting points for a warm melodic house pad:

• Cutoff: fairly low, around a third of the way up. The pad should sound a bit dark on its own.
• Resonance: low, around 10 to 15 percent. A little adds character to the filter movement. Too much and every chord starts to whistle.
• Envelope Amount: roughly 30 percent. This is how far the filter envelope opens the cutoff.
• Keyboard Amount: about halfway. Without key tracking, higher chord notes sound duller than lower ones, and your top voicing disappears.

Filter envelope

Both envelopes in Repro-5 go from about 2 milliseconds to more than 15 seconds, so you have plenty of range for slow pads.

• Attack: around 1 to 2 seconds, so the filter opens slowly after the note starts.
• Decay: 2 to 4 seconds.
• Sustain: around 50 to 60 percent. The pad settles a little darker than its peak, which keeps long chords from getting tiring.
• Release: similar to the amp release so the tone doesn't snap shut while the volume is still fading.

Amp envelope

• Attack: shorter than the filter attack, maybe half a second to a second. The volume comes in first, then the brightness follows. That order is what makes a pad feel like it swells.
• Sustain: full.
• Release: 2 to 3 seconds. At 122 BPM one bar is just under 2 seconds, so a release in this range bridges chord changes without smearing everything into one blur.

Play a slow minor seventh chord now. It should come in soft and dark, open up over a second or two, then settle.

Step 3: movement with Poly Mod and the LFO

A static pad is fine for 8 bars. Over a six minute melodic house track it needs to breathe. Repro-5 gives you two good ways to do that.

LFO on pulse width

In the LFO section pick the triangle shape and set a slow rate. You can sync it to the host: a cycle of a few bars works well. Set the wheel mod source mix fully to LFO and choose PW A as the destination. Now the pulse width of oscillator A slowly sweeps, which gives that classic chorus like shimmer from inside the synth.

Here's the catch that confuses a lot of people: the LFO in Repro-5 reaches its destinations through the mod wheel, just like on the original. With the wheel all the way down, you hear nothing. Either raise the mod wheel, or use the wheel mod limits: the manual explains that moving the lower red triangle up a little gives you a permanent minimum amount of modulation even when the wheel is at zero. I set a small permanent amount and keep the wheel for automation in the breakdown.

Poly Mod for slow drift

The VOICE MOD section routes the filter envelope and oscillator B to three destinations: oscillator A frequency, oscillator A pulse width and filter cutoff. This is the part that makes the Prophet sound so recognisable.

For pads I use a very small amount of FILT ENV going to filter cutoff and Freq A. A tiny amount to Freq A adds a subtle pitch movement in the attack, which reads as warmth rather than as an effect. Keep it subtle. Turn it up and you're in bell and brass territory, which is great for stabs but wrong for a pad under a vocal.

A more advanced trick: switch oscillator B to LO FREQ, which extends its range down into sub audio, turn its level down in the mixer and use it through Poly Mod as a second modulator on PW A or the filter. You lose oscillator B as a sound source, so I only do this when a single oscillator pad is enough, for example a thinner pad that sits high above a busy bassline.

Step 4: width and analog feel

This is where most Repro-5 pads fail in the mix. Everyone reaches for a stereo widener. You don't need one.

• Voice Detune: the knob sits to the right of oscillator B and detunes each voice slightly differently. The manual says it works whether unison is on or off. A small amount makes a chord feel like it's played on real hardware. A lot sounds out of tune.
• Voice pan trimmers: click SYNTH to open the TWEAKS view. At the bottom there's a row of eight trimmers, one stereo position per voice. Spread them gently left and right and every chord you play spreads across the stereo field. Because each note is still a mono voice, it holds up much better when the club system sums to mono than a chorus plugin does.
• Oscillator tweak: in the same view you can choose the oscillator model. P5 is the standard setting. P5 Old is described in the manual as a highly detuned version of it. Try it on pads when you want more wobble, then back off Voice Detune to compensate.

If you want to go deeper on stereo and mono compatibility, my post on making melodic techno leads wide without killing their power uses the same thinking for leads.

Step 5: effects inside Repro-5

Repro-5 has a solid effects section: a polyphonic distortion, Velvet tape saturation, the Lyrebird delay, ResQ EQ and resonator, the Drench plate reverb and the Sonic Conditioner. For pads I keep it simple:

• Velvet: a little Input Gain for tape warmth. It rounds the top end and glues the two oscillators together.
• Lyrebird: with a short time and the modulation on, it behaves like an analog style chorus. A low mix is enough.
• Drench: short and fairly dry, with some Pre Delay so the attack of the chord stays clear.

I leave the big reverb for a send in the DAW, so the pad, lead and plucks share one space.

Step 6: getting the pad to sit in a melodic house mix

Solo, a good Repro-5 pad sounds huge. In the track it fights the bass and the lead unless you make room. This is what I do in Logic Pro:

• High pass it. Channel EQ with a low cut somewhere around 150 to 250 Hz, depending on the chord voicing. The bass owns the low end.
• Voice the chords in the middle. Keep the pad roughly between C3 and C5. Chords played low get muddy with the bass. Chords played high clash with the lead.
• Dip the vocal or lead range. A wide, gentle cut around 2 to 4 kHz makes space for whatever carries the melody.
• Sidechain gently. Logic's Compressor with the kick as side chain, a few dB of gain reduction and a release that fits the groove. In melodic house the pad can pump a bit more than in techno, but it should still feel smooth.
• Check in mono. Flip the master to mono for a moment. If the pad drops a lot, pull the voice pan trimmers closer to the centre.

Layering can also help: a Repro-5 pad for warmth plus a thin, airy layer from another synth on top. I wrote about that in how to layer synths for deep, atmospheric electronic music.

Common mistakes with Repro-5 pads

• Waiting for the LFO with the wheel at zero. No wheel, no LFO. Set the lower wheel mod limit or move the wheel.
• Using unison on a pad. Unison stacks all voices on one note. Great for a fat lead or bass, wrong for chords.
• Filter attack shorter than amp attack. The pad sounds bright first, then gets louder, which feels backwards.
• Too much Voice Detune plus P5 Old. Each one adds instability. Together they make chords sound seasick.
• Long release everywhere. Five second releases on every chord turn the arrangement into soup. Match the release to your chord changes.

Questions producers ask

Is Repro-5 good for melodic house pads?

Yes. The two oscillator plus noise architecture, the warm lowpass filter and the per voice detune give you that classic analog poly sound that sits well under a melodic house groove.

Why is my Repro-5 LFO not doing anything?

The LFO is routed through the mod wheel. Raise the wheel or move the lower wheel mod limit up so there's always some modulation.

How do I make Repro-5 pads wider without phase problems?

Use the eight voice pan trimmers in the TWEAKS view and a little Voice Detune. Each voice stays mono, so the pad keeps its level when the mix is summed to mono.

How is Repro-5 different from Diva for pads?

Repro-5 focuses on one classic polysynth and its Poly Mod character. Diva lets you swap oscillator and filter models inside one synth. If you want to compare, my post on Diva oscillator models explains what each Diva model is good for.

Build this pad once, save it as your own starting patch, and you'll have a warm base for every melodic house chord progression that follows. If you'd rather start from finished sounds and see how they're built, have a listen to VOLTAGE for Repro-5 and open the pads first.