How To Ambient

got an tips for making ambient?

drones, etc

keep it quiet

pads

moon cup

think of mussolini and the answers will come to you

serious answer, in the new version of blok it is possible to EQ a FM modulator (obv not a sine but like a sawtooth osc, or even a waveshaped version of the osc, something with harmonics). If you do this you can actually affect/tweak the texture of the frequency modulation

Shitloads of reverb.

  On 1/16/2016 at 1:39 PM, xf said:

lush pads

fix't

ADSREEEEEEEELEEEEASE

I used to record the sound my soft lips made when kissing a Brian Eno poster in my room, then usually I asked a local hobo to play some pan flute over it. It was then looped for 10mn and released on extremely expansive digital vinyls.

  On 1/16/2016 at 2:54 PM, mokz said:

Shitloads of meth

  On 1/16/2016 at 1:39 PM, xf said:

pads

+

  On 1/16/2016 at 2:54 PM, mokz said:

Shitloads of reverb.

Then slow it down and add more reverb and a lead pad to which you add reverb.

Entorwellian's Home-Cooked Ambient Recipe.

1. Start with a signal input

2. Add delay

3. Line with a layer of compressor to prevent peaking

4. Add reverb

5. Repeat steps 2-4 until desired consistancy

6. Record for 10-25 minutes at 44100Hz Sample Rate

7. Garnish lightly with a sprinkling of samples

8. Serves a family of 12.

was it something i said?

seems like everybody in this thread is some kind of a wise guy or something.

first thing you're gonna want to do is plug all your gear in. then definitely use some field recordings, like of gentle water or rushing traffic. actually, combine both of these. then get some pads going. the attack should be no less than 33. in fact, if you can set your attack so like 3 hours go by before you hear anything then go with that. then do some reverb. like 100% wet. like completely fucking wet. and the decay should be like 15mins. or more. basically you want it so you just press a key and for like the entire track it's just reverb decay. you might want to put in a vocal sample that talks about like dreams or hypnosis or like nostalgia and remembering some stuff. this should be super soft though. maybe sample at a lower bit rate to get it kind of textural and stuff. about half way through you can add a nice arpeggio line but be careful it's not too fast.

3 sends: Reverb, Delay, Distortion. Send these into eachother.

oh also resample and stretch it out with granular synthesis/paulstretch

Is this thread for real?

Anyway, use your imagination

  On 1/17/2016 at 10:10 PM, Squee said:

Is this thread for real?

 

Anyway, use your imagination

my imagination just isn't working when I try to figure out how a lot of the below album was made. let me just rephrase the topic title to "how to make VERY GOOD ambient music" I am sure that the members of this forum prefer ENO or AFX's ambient albums for example to an accidental voice mail message.

record a lot of stems, field recording, noise, any kind of experiment, and save them for later

i don't like to use excessive reverb on main tones since it can make things muddy, it's good to use tonally ambiguous background textures (as in, not a lot of sustained clearly identifiable singular tones) like filtered white noise and reverb that up for some sense of space, then keep the main parts relatively dry

robert rich had a good tip that went width = depth, i.e if you have a wide stereo image with nearer sounding signals, then have longer decaying reverbs & stuff dead center that will usually make it feel very deep and 3D

to me it matters more if the sounds are lush than if i can fill time up with noise, but i fail 99% of the time to get anything to sound lush, so i usually give up and instead just go ahead and make crap noises. the quality of "lushness" evades me. but it seems that thousands of electronic musicians out there seem to nail lush sounds, as if there is some sort of formula or zone or lines on the road that they drive on. some producers seem to get it right every time, and Eno seems to be one of them. How does he get it right? I know this is headed a little off topic but.

Recording wind chimes and drenching them in reverb before going into a compressor. Lots of pads, bowing guitar with a cello bow through some processing then sampling, reverb, reverb, create space, utilize stereo field, LFO mod-source noise/sample spiral fun.

Field Samples.

  On 1/17/2016 at 8:45 AM, Entorwellian said:

Entorwellian's Home-Cooked Ambient Recipe.

 

1. Start with a signal input

2. Add delay

3. Line with a layer of compressor to prevent peaking

4. Add reverb

5. Repeat steps 2-4 until desired consistancy

6. Record for 10-25 minutes at 44100Hz Sample Rate

7. Garnish lightly with a sprinkling of samples

8. Serves a family of 12.

lol

Creates 50 ambient albums and names them 'pale blue dot'

Put reverb on your reverb.

i am enjoying the sarcy comments above....

Mine was sarcastic, true, but also real advice.

or buy preset floppies from greytsounds like aphex did for Saw2