Now, we'll switch gears and look at the non-rhythm instruments. A non-rhythm instrument is any instrument that adds color to an arrangement, but doesn't provide the rhythmic sense of the song. It just so happens that your garden-variety synthesizer can reproduce a reasonable facsimile of most of these color instruments, the primary exception being the guitars. Very-transparent sounds are less articulate and fall into the background better, but are only suitable for playing chords. Semi-transparent sounds have more of a distinct attack and are more suited for playing specific melodic or harmonic lines.
Organs are a special case and how they fit in depends entirely on how they're played.
We'll cover organ in a later issue. For now, we'll concentrate on stringy pad sounds. Low notes should rarely be used. Unless you are using a very, very transparent sound, open-voiced chords should be used over close voicing. Busy playing just doesn't work well with pad sounds.