Distortion/saturation and/or granulators in ambient.

Hi folks. Getting ready for my next part of a podcast, and Im going deeper into ambient this time. Even though Ive been influenced by the music of Steve Roach and Vidna Obmana, I love the distortion that I hear on pads, drones and other atmospheres in some of Tim Hecker's works and other artists too. Those of you who make ambient and like to use this kind of stuff, what plugins do you like to use?

There seems to be some sort of distortion and/or saturation used and I hear some use them in combination with various granulators, but there is a very velvet and smooth sound to it even though distorted and id like to know what people use to achieve this smoothness. I use Cubase to make music so ableton is not a choice right now. I know its a matter of ear and experimenting but Id appreciate some advice. Thanx in advance guys.

Hey,

I'd say that as usual, what's the most important is how you're processing the sound more than which tools you're using (even if this parameter obviously has an impact on what you're producing), but I usually perform that kind of saturation on pads with D16 Devastor (more because I didn't find another cool tool for that so far). I'm still experimenting with that and the results are often surprising (and not always good) ; I could find some really cool pad sounds that way though.

EQing or even filtering your distorted sounds should probably be the more efficient thing to start with if you want to smooth the output of the distortion. Reverb as well.

Looking forward to others EKT's two cents !

compression an eq especially for drone stuff

for smoothing out a chorus FX can work wonders after the reverb stage, low mod depth with high mod speed

I don't really use any distortion, but rather do most stuff in hardware and setup a bunch of feedback loops through different gear.

For me it's just about how the sounds sit in the mix and not so much about any particular sound. I do find however that having sounds that are really "sharp" in an ambient environment as the intended outcome in most cases is to not pull attention to itself.

I actually find that to be the real definition of ambient music. Most ambient music I hear on the web is not really ambient, but rather atmospheric as it's meant to be at the epicenter of attention. I think that's fine, and I like atmospheric music, but it's a bit misleading to call it ambient.

Anyways, back to the thread haha.

I have nothing to add, except that I use Grainstates and Grainstates FX in Reaktor to get some Hecker-ish sounds. I'm curious to know more about this topic.

I like to dump a shit ton of reverb on a pad/sound that I'm going to use as a pad, delay it a bit, compress and maybe eq the high end out of it. That way it kind of smoothly distorts itself by overlapping itself so many times without creating any harsh edges. If I'm working in Ableton I'll just use their reverb and delay plug-ins. If I'm working in FL Studio then I'll use the Uhbik effects suite with their reverb and delay. Again, I'll just try to get everything overlapping itself, so that it creates a little distortion without getting too harsh.

Guitar stomp boxes are pretty good at adding some meat to your ambient stuff - You can get them real cheap from second hand stores, and they add quite a nice physical sound to the input.

  On 3/3/2013 at 1:10 AM, mcbpete said:

Guitar stomp boxes are pretty good at adding some meat to your ambient stuff - You can get them real cheap from second hand stores, and they add quite a nice physical sound to the input.

here some pretty good freeware modeled stomp boxes http://www.tseaudio.com/software.html very well done, bit of CPU killer though

you can get some nasty sounds from this

if you want quality distortion in plug-in form, your best bet is to use guitar pedal/amp simulator plugins like Guitar Rig and others. you could get what your after just by experimenting with different amp / cabinet / mic combinations and messing with the overdrive / eq.

  On 3/3/2013 at 8:03 AM, digit said:

if you want quality distortion in plug-in form, your best bet is to use guitar pedal/amp simulator plugins like Guitar Rig and others. you could get what your after just by experimenting with different amp / cabinet / mic combinations and messing with the overdrive / eq.

Ah yeah and there's also the Amplitube free pack. It's quite a heavy VST but it's powerful. So far I didn't use it so much but I heard it's very good.

..for some solid drone-noise pollution i'm using

Voxengo Boogex

and/or

Frohmage

..in a feedback loop via delay or reverb and some limiter love afterwards.

Hmm may I ask what you guys call a feedback loop ?

yes, sorry, that wasn't very clear(and does sound a bit redundant..feedback<->loop). I'm just splitting the signal and feeding the delayed part back to the main signal via aux/bus for better overall control of the actual feedback effect i.e. when things get interesting..

ya exactly. Just use a send out to some gear, and instead of bringing it back into the mixer via the return, use a track. Then turn up the send on that track. It's really fun with cheap guitar pedals, or anything with an autowah kinda effect. You can use this technique at low levels to fatten up a reverb pretty nice too.

Wow! These answers overcame my expectations, thanks a lot for your invaluable tips everybody. I do use some electroguitar cabinets and racks for pads and atmospheres, but all of your answers gave me lots of new ideas Im trying out. The deadline is not far away and I have to submit my mix soon, the tracks are quite difficult to re-work as its not easy to present a decent ambient piece, trying to work hard these days as its like writing a new piece from scratch.

Chorus after the reverb I have to try that, in the meantime tryin out to automate some filter parameters like cutoff and others to remove the harshness and the irritating resonance of the sound, lots of EQ experiments too but so that i dont kill the sound. Also have to try a limiter for extremely distorted/saturated atmospheres, not easy to make something harsh sound like velvet. Feedback loops from one gear to another or among VST plugins using sends, signal splitting and feeding into sources + other techniques is a very interesting issue too.

As far as Reverb VST is concerned, this is probably one of my most favorite and mysterious themes. Some prefer convolution processors, others love Lexicon or CSRs, some others adore TC electronics whereas many love to use free stuff like Ambience or TAL stuff.

Anyway, great stuff folks, I appreciate your help.

I'm having huge fun with Sonic Charge's Permut8, on everything and anything, and on pads/drone too. It saturates/distorts in a such a pleasant way, and the countless weird delay/feedback based effect you can achieve with it is so inspiring. Can make wonders before and after reverb.

quick tip : use gate as a distortion unit on pads/drone : instant Tim Hecker tone.

oh man I love sonic charge. They make such great things. Permut8 is like 8mb! I love it. :) no faff at all in their stuff.