what the heck I'll give all my tricks away
In that spirit, I'd like to offer some options that let your software do some of the heavy lifting:
Limit Polyphony: Say you're playing in some four note chords, and you need to add some passing chords or voice leading to the phrasing. Set your polyphony limit to three notes, and let voice-stealing subtract from your bass line and add a new voice on top. It's the same thing with overlapping envelopes with a long release, or use of the sustain pedal.
Start with the maximum number of simultaneous notes [ex. 8], and reduce the polyphony down in single increments. You'll get a surprisingly different "texture" characteristic with each setting. It also helps to thin down some complex chords, and works well with two combined pad synths. It's an interesting effect as both synths dance around chord positions as the voices are stolen and added back.
Echoed Voices: Set this up: A single delay, no feedback, sync'ed to tempo and level-controlled by a slider or automation. You can overlap chord changes and bring in just a little flavor of the previous chord by fading in the single delay. It doesn't get too busy-sounding, and you can fade it in on only select transitions. Try it at 100% wet followed by a reverb for an overpowering effect.
Layers of Scales: Load up your pad synth, and create a new layer. Enable MIDI Override for both layer and original track. In the layer, add a Transpose MFX instance, and set it to a complimentary scale [in Key/Scale] for your chord progression. In the Options menu, make sure that "MIDI Override Follows Current Track" is ticked.
Arm both tracks, and start recording. By using the up & down Qwerty arrows while playing, you can shift between your played chord progression and a new phrasing created by the shifted layer in an alternate scale. Both track and layer create a pattern, which can later be combined by a Bounce To Track.
This yields a lot of interesting variations, yet it remains separately editable until the Bounce. Of course, there's no reason to limit yourself to a single added layer. If you just want to shift by something simple, like fifths, skip the Transpose plugin and set the Transpose function in the layer's Track Inspector to +7 or -5.
Oscillator Crossfades: It might be obvious, but I'll mention it anyway. If you're only using two of four oscillators, use those spares transposed to different intervals. Then set up the levels in MIDI Remote Controls to fade between each set with some adjacent controller sliders or similar. For example,bring in two oscillators on the Mod Wheel, and two come in transposed on the Pitchbend.
No one likes to use multiple instances of the same synth if they don't
have to; sometimes that's the only way to go. But in something like Dimension, the samples are only added once to memory. Take advantage of those unused Elements and reference that single wavsample. Set up intervals in the additional Elements, and selectively trigger the Elements or crossfade between them. There's hardly any hit on available resources.
Great thread.