A Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is essentially a virtual music studio. Layering a long percussion loop an odd number of bars in length over a basic drum loop can also often maintain interest. Amp modelling was used to shape the basic guitar sound in this instance, but what you do is entirely down to your own artistic tastes. All music, and indeed all sound, is made up of complex combinations of frequencies. But before uploading your tracks for others to hear, it’s always a good idea to play them on a variety of systems and headphones/earbuds — and to forward copies to friends who you know have good ears and won’t just flatter you. Examples. Re: How correctly record solo/bass MONO or STEREO? Chorus and compression can add a ‘fretless’ quality to bass guitar, while the sort of tempo-sync’ed tremolo or chopping I discussed earlier can be used to add a rhythmic pulse to just about any bass part. Most DAWs come with their own proprietary instrument libraries, but they are usually limited. April 15, 2017 April 15, 2017 synthhead Electronic Musicians ambient music, Brian Eno. Drones - long, continuous notes or chords in music - are nothing new. For example, you may find when setting up a mix balance that you feel a section of rhythm or pad needs to drop out to create a breakdown section, or to give a section more space. I’m also curious how Selector will suggest the different parts I need to create a calming ambient track. Pads from spoken word 1: I started with a simple spoken-word phrase. Tempo-sync’ed tremolos, or ‘choppers’, can inject a strong rhythmic feel into any of the sustained sounds used in an ambient production. Capturing random audio clips can provide an interesting starting point, and often provides plenty of inspiration. Pads resemble swelling orchestral chords, but usually have a more muted and less textured quality. Another favourite tool is Output’s Movement, a powerful plug-in which can be used to add rhythmic interest to almost any source. hilariously impractical electronic partner, How to Mic a Cello for Live and Recording, Best Talk Boxes for Guitar, Keyboard, Synthesizer, and More. Other budget-friendly options include Waves plugins such as Abbey Road Plates and H-Reverb. I also often remove a lot of low end from the reverb, typically with a 6 or 12 dB/octave low-cut filter at 300-400 Hz, to stop the sound getting too muddy. Why would an element in a mix be audible in both the Mid and Sides channels? Don’t use too much movement in your arrangement at once. If your guitar playing involves string bending and vibrato, the action of the fast pitch-correction produces a very Eastern feel, turning deep vibrato into trills, and speeding up any bends. To immerse yourself in great ambient music, to imitate what you like, and to deeply listen to your own creations. Pads from spoken word 3: Insert a pitch-corrector, set to a scale of your choice and to its fastest correction. Things can become very interesting when you use an EBow to play a melody, and then use pitch-correction to constrain that melody to a single note, or a more restricted range of notes.To create chords, layer three or four EBow parts, each one playing a different note of the desired chord; the example song includes a musical fifth added to a basic drone. Frequencies between 250-500 Hz are known to feel “warm.” They are one of the reasons we associate vinyl records with a warm sound- vinyl is not great for bass, so engineers would boost these low-mids to compensate. How correctly record solo/bass MONO or STEREO? Importantly, you have to tune only to the notes of a scale or chord of your choice — in this case, a scale comprising just the three notes of the D minor chord. So much modern technology essentially takes the form of dominion over random natural forces. Things can also become very interesting when you use an EBow to … Try to avoid (or edit out) sibilant sounds.Pads from spoken word 2: Use whatever time-stretching tools you have to stretch the clip to three or four times its original length. The sound is influenced by which pickups are active at the time, and the timbre also varies as you slide the bow between the pickup positions. Ambient music tends to favor certain kinds of synth or sampled instruments. Into the Abyss: Make Ambient Drones in Live. I find that a little emulated tube saturation can also benefit the lows and highs, while keeping the mids clean. Many ambient tracks use pads in the forefront of the arrangement. Clocks, fridges, power tools, spray cans, wind chimes, rain-sticks, shells, toys and so on are all usable with just a little editing, time-stretching, occasional reversing and other processing to hide their true origins quite effectively. Since the final edited vocal doesn’t actually need to make any sort of lyrical sense, you can use pretty much anything as a starting point — in this case, I began with my former SOS colleague JG Harding reading out a definition of potatoes! Sometimes, it’s simply a case of rebalancing effects levels, but more high- and low-cut filtering may be needed to constrain the effects. A good pair of neutral studio monitors or headphones is absolutely crucial. Includes two modes of operation: - Auto (Generative music in all it's glory) - Manual (For the musician in you) Use the built-in touchpads to play along with (or without) music generated in auto mode. Hello Composers, Mike here. Reverb plugins can cost a silly amount of money for the best out there. 27 thoughts on “ Brian Eno On How To Make Ambient Music ” Satan. There are no right answers in music- if it sounds good, it is good. Warm, soothing swells that imitate the calm power of a distant ocean or a light breeze. Apply assertive pitch-correction and, as before, enable only the notes of the chord or scale you wish to use. The protests of some musicians and A&R people notwithstanding, I believe one of these names in particular – ambient – is a perfectly useful signpost for the phenomenon. (If you’re disinclined to record such things yourself, try searching for inspiration online — the https://freesound.org website would be a good place to start.). All rights reserved. In typical music production, you hear a lot of “sizzle” and percussion and vocal syllables in this range. Ambient Sounds are created by navigating to the Sounds layer of the active Scene by clicking on the musical notes icon in the Scene control palette. But online distribution forces me to put my music into a category, and while there are elements of chillout and electronica in my music, it doesn’t fit those genres neatly, and neither does it feature the sort of rhythms you’d find in trance or EDM. So have a listen, and if the sounds and textures appeal to you, read on to discover how it’s done... Brian Eno is famously keen on embracing the unintentional, and I totally understand where he’s coming from. Yet, nature is far from silent. That said, I’ve also used tuned percussion such as log drums in the past, and an EBow line pitch-shifted down by an octave produces a bowed bass sound on some of my album tracks. The rules of reverb are a bit different than other types of music production. You may login with either your assigned username or your e-mail address. Check out the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and AKAI MPK Mini MkII for an excellent entry-level interface and MIDI keyboard respectively. To set this up using your basic plug-ins, insert the pitch-shifter before a reverb on an aux channel, and send your source to it; the reverb will help to hide any pitch-shifting artifacts. Finally, remember to really listen to what’s going on in your mixes. You will be able to create anything from magical atmospheres, to thrilling underscore moods, to dark and evil soundscapes. Usually in music, it’s important to avoid too much bass and low-mid presence in reverb tails, because this leads to a muddy mix. The music exists not to create a new feeling, but to nurture natural feelings, to enhance an environment without detracting from it. Pads from spoken word 4: Zynaptiq’s Adaptiverb is particularly good at making your processed voice recording sound more musical, because you can set the reverb tail to ‘pick out’ specific scale notes. That said, as you listen to more, you will notice the threads that run through ambient music. That is to say, ambient music is defined by its goal to create unobtrusive sonic moods. Allow the water sounds to be the dominate noise. This could also give you a starting point to create an ambient soundscape. Such reverbs often produce fairly low-density tails which sound too crunchy on drums but can sound lovely on guitar. Their solution is to attempt to create with less - to create a complete musical world in any given moment, but to do so under a specific set of rules or restrictions. It can add a calm feeling to an environment without detracting. High-pass sounds to make them sound more distant too. Things can become very interesting when you use an EBow to play a melody, and then use pitch-correction to constrain that melody to a single note, or a more restricted range of notes. It promises to turn your iOS device into an ambient music creation studio, with a library of presets that you can customize (or create yourself) to lay down those mellow soundscapes on the go. Then it’s time to audition what you have, and separate out those parts that work really well from those which don’t. In ambient music, this can actually be a virtue. It’s not great for drums and percussion, but that won’t be an issue with ambient music. This is not a step-by-step tutorial on how to make soundscapes, but rather a collection of tips and processes that I’ve learned over the years. I call it ‘mixing’ but, as with lots of dance music (being in the 70-90 bpm range everything happens rather more slowly than with dance! Things can also become very interesting when you use an EBow to play a melody, and then use pitch-correction to constrain that melody to a single note, or a more restricted range of notes. I personally use Voxengo’s OldSkoolVerb regularly. Tempo-sync’ed tremolos, or ‘choppers’, can inject a strong rhythmic feel into any of the sustained sounds used in an ambient production.A technique for further experimentation with such sounds is to use the aforementioned tempo-linked chopping tactic, using a square-wave-driven tremolo plug-in to modulate the voice. They were popular in the 80s and 90s in music production- check out the piano sound of Bruce Hornsby’s The Way It Is, backed up by heavy pad usage. If you want to create your own ambient soundscapes, you have your work cut out for you. My best advice is to keep an eye on the loudness meter to make sure you don’t push things too hard, and to avoid excessive limiting. If you are a true novice, try learning some major chords. BBC Click’s Spencer Kelly spends an afternoon talking art, science, music and potatoes with music legend and godfather of ambient music Brian Eno. Used on acoustic or clean electric guitars it adds an almost string-like sheen. Slowly shifting soundscapes. Any loops/sounds can be used as long as they are more on the droning sound, than melody or beat based. Just click on an image below to start chilling. My first action was to time-stretch his spoken phrase to around five or six times its original length, which obviously introduced noticeable processing artifacts while rendering the words almost unrecognisable. The Foundations of Ambient Music . (You can hear this technique at play on some of the Cydonia Collective tracks. Lower frequencies either sound very close or very powerful. Electric and acoustic guitars also feature extensively, as I feel they add a pleasing ‘organic’ dimension to what could otherwise sound too obviously electronic. Place a chorus, flanger or rotary speaker emulator directly after the reverb to add further texture without affecting the dry sound, and if this all sounds a little too obvious, try moving the modulation between the reverb and the pitch-shifter. But ambient music tends to move much more slowly. Play around until you find a sequence of chords you like. I've linked the procedures I've made so you can download them for yourself, I've also added comments to them if you're interested in learning how and why it works! Then adding a slow rotary speaker emulation afterwards makes a useful alternative to chorus or phasing. Acoustic guitar (or clean electric guitar, DI’ed and with no amp emulation) can also sound very effective. It’s easy to teach gear and overarching production principles. Whatever we call it, it’s a style that features lots of sound-design elements, some based on musical sources, others more from found sounds, such as mechanical noises and spoken word. I aim to conjure up a chilled overall feel, and this often turns out to be a fine balancing act, as there must be enough happening to hold the listener’s attention, but not so much as to break the mood of the piece. Finally, 10k-20k Hz is a very detailed, textured range. A laptop, audio interface, MIDI keyboard, and decent set of speakers or headphones is enough to create professional-level music in 2019. For more examples, check out the Bandcamp page of my current collaboration with musician Mark Soden, which goes under the name of the Cydonia Collective — all of the techniques covered here can be heard on both our debut album Stasis and our recently released follow-up Lost Horizon (https://cydoniacollective.bandcamp.com). October 15, 2017. (You’ll need to set the delay’s feedback after applying the filtering, as the EQ settings affect the output level, which in turn affects the number of audible repeats.) Try repeating the chord progression 4-8 times, and gradually weave other instruments and sound effects on top. It makes a good alternative to chorus or phasing.A similar vocal approach that has yielded good results (but doesn’t feature in the AES example) requires you or a friend to sing nonsense phrases, ideally containing no breaths or sibilant S and T sounds, in as deep and throaty a growl as possible. Ambient music soothes and relaxes. I then cut out the elements that were most adversely affected by the time-stretching (particularly breaths and sibilant sounds) before creating a reversed duplicate part on a new track, so the forward and the reversed sections could be played simultaneously. Tone and timbre are really important in Ambient music. Reverb with a longer tail sounds like a larger and more open space, whereas a shorter tail sounds like a smaller or medium room. You can play with this in ambient music. Instead of composing melodies and writing arrangements, we define a number of fixed parameters and let the music write itself! Then adding a slow rotary speaker emulation afterwards makes a useful alternative to chorus or phasing. Particularly because people understand music in different ways- some people learn piano and like to see sheet music, some learn music by feeling or by chords and patterns. Being honest, I don’t know if that’s the perfect description for what I make — ‘ambient’ can mean different things to different people. When it comes to writing original ambient music, your starting point depends on your music theory level. Much as I like this tool, though, it’s worth pointing out that you can achieve something similar with careful use of any tremolo plug-in that offers a choice of square or sine modulation waveforms and has a tempo-sync option — and you could also try side-chaining a gate from a rhythmic source, as long as the gate has a range/floor control. But it’s often much more inspiring to create pad sounds simply through the extreme processing of quite random audio recordings. Key elements in my music include long, evolving sounds that can be used in place of traditional synth pads or drones, ethereal piano treatments, ear-candy (patches of sonic ‘glitter’, used for punctuation), warm but non-intrusive bass sounds, processed natural or mechanical sounds, and realistic but smooth-sounding sampled strings. Then add delay and reverb to turn the vocal into something more musical. A bit of wow and flutter emulation, if you have a delay that offers that, can help the repeats degrade. Q. Web site designed & maintained by PB Associates & SOS. Creating electronic music requires very little physical gear these days. If you balance your sounds properly, this will be on its way to a complete ambient song! Ambient music is obviously a vague "genre." For instance, Sub51 Sound Design (www.sub51.co.uk) produce a very low-cost library of one-shot ear-candy effects, including a few I donated. Put a chopper on each and flip the polarity of one of the chopper plug-ins — the ‘slices’ of sound will alternate between the two tracks, creating an auto-panned tremolo effect which, on such material, can really add to the atmosphere. So often, we listen to music as a stimulant. You can play with these perceptions to create an immersive environment. We want to feel inspired to sing, move, dance. The Golden Guidelines of Ambient Music. How to make Ambient Soundscapes. We are a long way from the 70s, with Stevie Wonder’s hilariously impractical electronic partner. Ambient music frequently cuts in this area, as anything that’s prominent in this range tends to grab attention, and in fact its tiring to listen to for long periods- the opposite of ambient music’s goal. If any parts still sound particularly glitchy or unmusical, just chop them out with your DAW’s editing tools. Ambient music is a fairly diverse genre though. A lot of ambient music features sustained warm tones in this range. If you need to lengthen a section, it usually works best if you first render the audio with pitch-correction — that way, you can crossfade it into a copy of itself without confusing the pitch corrector. The human ear soon tunes out repetition, so even if your underlying drum loop is repetitive, such processing on one part can help to add variation to the layered percussion parts when the ‘rhythm section’ plays for any length of time. I really got into making ambient soundscapes a few years ago, while working as a composer and sound designer on the award-winning indie game The Swapper. Parts played using the aforementioned EBow (an inexpensive monophonic ‘infinite sustain’ electronic bow for guitar) can be really useful for building up layers to create your own unique shifting pad sounds, or as a new layer to add textural movement to an existing pad. Don’t worry about processing artifacts; they’ll sound obvious at this stage, but we’ll address that later.For my AES seminar, I deconstructed a technique I often use to transform short sections of speech into musical pads. It can also throw pitch-shifting into the mix, or freeze the reverb spectrum from one sound and impose it on another. (While Jeff Beck might get this right 99.9 percent of the time, most of us mere mortals will, I’m sure, appreciate the electronic assistance!). If you want, you can even create your own atmospheric sound mix, online and for free.Every audio template can be easily edited for your own needs. WIN Prism Sound TITAN audio interface & Waveform Extreme software bundle, Aaron Dessner: Producing folklore And evermore, Abbey Road Studios Spatial Audio Forum | Podcast. It tends to grab attention and add energy. Supplement your soundscapes with sounds from free sound effect libraries such as Freesound. For example, swelling cymbals, wind chimes, and rain sticks. The arrangements that I develop in this way could best be described as ‘evolutionary’ — they don’t follow a traditional verse/ chorus/ middle-eight structure. And sometimes it could barely even be called music; more of a soundscape, with few traditional notes. Drone FX ambient music app has tons of top-quality, built-in sounds for you to play with. The views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the publishers. Bass frequencies decay more quickly over open spaces, so distant sounds are mostly mid and high frequencies. Such music has many names: ambient, new age, contemporary instrumental, experimental, spacerock, chillout, ambient techno, ambient trance, mood music, world music, new acoustic music. Buying Waves plugins is a humorously inefficient process. Your Adventure in Ambient Music Composition. You can use anything, though note that the more pitch-modulation in the original recording, the better.