Worship Pads
Sustained ambient pads in every key, generated live in your browser. Nothing to download, nothing to buffer, one keypress per change.
Using pads without getting in the way
A pad is a sustained chord that sits underneath everything else. Its job is to remove silence — the gap between a song ending and someone starting to speak, the moment while a band changes key, the space under a prayer. Done well nobody notices it at all, which is the entire measure of success.
Set the level once, low. A pad that people can identify is too loud. It should be felt more than heard — if someone can hum along to it, pull it down. Set the volume here rather than on the desk so the balance survives being unplugged and plugged back in.
Change key before the band does, not after. Start the crossfade a bar or two early. Because the new pad rises while the old one falls, the two overlap harmonically for a moment, and that overlap is what makes the change sound intentional rather than like a mistake being corrected.
Match the key, not the chord. Pads follow the key of the song, not each chord within it. Switching pad on every chord change produces mud. If a song genuinely modulates, change then — otherwise leave it alone for the whole song.
Learn the shortcuts. Every key has a single character: 1 through 0 then a and b, running C upward. During a service you want to change key without looking down, and a keyboard shortcut is far more reliable than finding a small button on a trackpad in a dark room. Space or Escape stops everything.
One honest note on what this is: the sound is synthesised from oscillators rather than sampled from real instruments, so it is cleaner and plainer than a commercial pad library. That is a deliberate trade. It means the whole thing loads instantly, works with no network, costs nothing, and can be audited — and for filling a gap under a spoken word, plain is usually exactly what you want.
Frequently asked questions
No. The pads are synthesised in your browser using the Web Audio API rather than streamed from a file, so there is nothing to download, nothing to buffer and nothing to run out of. That also means it keeps working if the wifi at your venue does not.
Press the number or letter shown on the key you want. The new pad fades in while the old one fades out, so there is never a gap. Every key has a single-character shortcut, so you can change without looking at the screen.
It sets how long one key takes to become the next. A long crossfade hides the change; a short one is more decisive. Four seconds suits most transitions between songs, and you can go up to twelve if you want the change to be genuinely invisible.
This is a synthesised pad, not a recorded one. It is six detuned oscillator pairs through a lowpass filter, deliberately simple so it sits under a band rather than competing with it. If you want lush recorded textures, buy them — this is for the times you need something usable immediately and free.
Yes. Everything here is MIT licensed and there is no watermark, no attribution requirement and no rights holder to clear. Route your laptop output to the desk as you would any other source.
Yes, though you have to tap a key rather than use a keyboard shortcut. Browsers require a tap before any audio can start, which is why the first key press is what actually starts the sound.
Only the third changes, and the pad deliberately keeps it quiet. A pad sits underneath whatever the band is playing, so the more strongly it asserts a third, the more often it clashes with a passing chord. If you are unsure, major is the safer choice.
It already does. Once the page has loaded, everything runs locally — no requests are made while you play. Load the page before the service and you can safely disconnect.
The Zeal Promise
Non-negotiable, on every tool we ship.
- No sign-up — ever
- No watermarks on any output
- No ads near the download button
- Works fully on mobile
- Privacy-first: processing stays in your browser
- Open source (MIT) — audit it, contribute, self-host
- Zero runtime dependencies in tool logic