Ambience, Drones & Soundscapes

Hi folks. over the last months ive been experimenting with beatless stuff, making ambient environments, trying to create various soundscapes, drones, atmospheric grains and generally sonic conditions that go nicely with that kind of direction. What are your ways of making this kind of music (apart from Reaktor)? which interesting plugins do you use and which effects, what kind of chains and effect combinations would you suggest? thank you in advance.

Recording to tape and then play back slowed down a lot is a good technique

Reverb - lots of it. And from there on it's up to you.

  On 11/17/2011 at 1:16 PM, Jonas said:

fieldrecording + paulstretch/dsp/vst/cdp/wavelab-montage = win.

Truth. Sometimes the weirdest real life ambiences can create the best drones and tones. I once recorded that weird high pitched sounds that rail road tracks make a couple of seconds before a train arrives and it has saved my sound designing ass loads of times.

Most of the fun in making ambient music comes from the really whacky, off-the-wall experiments you can try out in order to achieve the desired end result. For instance, The Truth started off with Nina bowing her electric guitar with a metal ruler, making the most wonderfully horrendous sound. She then gave the recording to me, and I promptly Paulstretched it, and added a soft, melodic / harmonic pad for about the second half of the track. Both channels are drenched in varying levels of delay and reverb. Then I hid in an Easter egg towards the end, to finish off the album.

Get creative! Get experimental! Use, abuse and hack instruments and other household objects. Go to the streets with a sound recorder, as others here have suggested. Find out what everyone else is doing, and do something else that we wouldn't have thought of.

I like to downsample pads with Decimort, then add detuned delays and/or reverb.

A fun trick is to get an audio file (field recording or any live instrument will do), dial up a really short gate to just where it peaks - it will open up arrhythmically (or not) and sound like a car radio struggling to tune into a station. Add reverb, maybe a little timestretching, and you might get some interesting results.

On a side note, I really like some of the drones and soundscapes on Andy Stott's We Stay Together record; a lot of it sounds like stretched field recordings, and really old pitched down tape.

you guys are awesome. i also like making weird experiments and putting everything into the mincer. i also love listening to other peoples techniques and way of doing things, it is always very educational and helps me with my projects. for example i had no idea about Paulstretch that seems to be a very powerful tool. stretching in Cubase can be awful, even though i dont know if its due to the stretch algorithms i use. Soundhack looks fantastic

try adding a chorus after the reverb to spread things out

subtle distortion with the mid-top eq scooped out works well

the spectronics atmosphere vst is cheating but does sound really good

best hardware synths i've tried for drones are the dx7, blofeld and nord modular

Try to avoid big pads, reverb and time stretching.

In all honesty though, just try everything you can think of, it's all fair game.

If you haven't already look into granular synthesis, you can make big clouds of sound that can be quite an interesting listening experience.

could you please recommend some granulizers since you mentioned granular synthesis (apart from Reaktor)? by the way, been playing with Paulstretch, its fantastic

thNX

  On 11/17/2011 at 11:28 PM, mollekula said:

could you please recommend some granulizers since you mentioned granular synthesis (apart from Reaktor)? by the way, been playing with Paulstretch, its fantastic

http://argotlunar.info/

great thread, really helpful, look forward to playing with new techniques

My finest moment . . I took a note off an old Pantomime 4, it's a new note, between B and C, I always knew it was there. Anyway, I jammed it to itself, looped it back, mixed it with the sound of a crab committing suicide, then let it stew in its own reverb for about three hours. Before recording it I pumped it out through an old brown oxford, which gave it a proper oaky finish. Beautiful.

http://xenakios.wordpress.com/

i forget how i make my sounds and i like it that way i had a baby laughing sample and i made it into a rainforest of tropical alien birds and idk how i even did that but whatever i guess

thank you RadarJammer, HourGlass is superb

for the Live users out there, what are the best add-ons, built in or max4live granular effects or generators?

  On 11/27/2011 at 9:42 AM, Awepittance said:

for the Live users out there, what are the best add-ons, built in or max4live granular effects or generators?

I don't know about granular stuff specifically but maxforlive.com is getting huge and it might be worth devoting a weekend to checking many of the uploads out. I just stumbled across the Ircam M4L site and watched the demo videos which look kinda cool.

I've had some pretty cool stuff arise from using convolution reverb. Use a sample instead of a room reverb sample, and you can get some pretty gnarly sounding stuff.

  On 11/27/2011 at 12:17 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

I've had some pretty cool stuff arise from using convolution reverb. Use a sample instead of a room reverb sample, and you can get some pretty gnarly sounding stuff.

qtf

actually my sig is an example. :D

  On 11/27/2011 at 10:06 AM, RadarJammer said:

  On 11/27/2011 at 9:42 AM, Awepittance said:

for the Live users out there, what are the best add-ons, built in or max4live granular effects or generators?

 

I don't know about granular stuff specifically but maxforlive.com is getting huge and it might be worth devoting a weekend to checking many of the uploads out. I just stumbled across the Ircam M4L site and watched the demo videos which look kinda cool.

i just did a 3 hour scouring of those websites and found a few really useful granular effects

  Quote

Granulator is a Max4Live synthesizer based on the principle of quasi-synchronous granular synthesis. It creates a constant stream of short crossfading sections of the source sample, and the pitch, position and volume of each grain can be modulated in many ways to create a great variety of interesting sounds. Granulator also offers two multimode filters in series to further shape the resulting timbre. Granulator is the latest incarnation of a series of granular based synthesizers I wrote for my own usage since the invention of MaxMSP in 1997.

http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=679

  Quote

A granular audio freezer effect. Creates lush textures out of everything! by Monolake

http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=240