Ambience

[Synesthesia]

Maybe this is a more technical question, but I'm just wondering. Who here likes ambient textures and effects in their music? I'm talking stuff like in Floyd, Radiohead, Porcupine Tree, etc. or even electronica/trance that many people dismiss as "blips and bleeps" but I absolutely love (as long as there's some music to back it up).

I wanna start adding some texture to my music. What's a good way to start? I've been messing around with white/pink/brown noise and tones in Cool Edit Pro for a while, but that only goes so far. I want some really cool, trippy stuff. Anything goes, as long as there's lots of variation. Any ideas?

Thanks!
-Derrick

[stonepiano]

I like the sound of weather in songs... why not try a storm or gentle rain?

[Garry Sharp]

I can't stand the rain.....

What would happen if you took a clip of wind sound off a mic held outdoors and looped it?

[HogansHiro]

sounds like you're looking for more of a "bed" to pull everything together. Sound beds are usually the root key of the song and not too busy....maybe a few diffrent instrumenst like synths/strings keeping the root note and then modulating to the fifth...you don't want to make a bed too chordal as it will soon clash w/ the song itself.

Hope that makes sense

[applesmasher]

well i guess it depnds on what kind of music your doing. Light rock? Metal? ominous? warm? theres all kinds of crazy effects you can mkae or buy ambient sample cds.

[rucarlso]

You wanna psych the songs out a bit. That's what I do, too. There's all sorts of things you can do to get trippy sounds.

If you're interested in generating these sounds in the computer, try things like pitchshifting guitars--make them slower. A fingerpicked guitar line I once recorded turned into psychedelic bliss when I slowed the wave file down. I pulled my favorite freak out bits from the slow wave file placed them into the song at places where they made the most effect. Take cymbals hits, reverse them, put a load of reverb on them, reverse 'em again, put far back in the mix....just do the stuff that seems weird. The computer is unlimited. You can also download a program like Audio Mulch (it's free) and mess around with it, looping waves and adding effects......you'll create some very spacious ambience.

[Mentat]

What Rucarlso said. Reverb well-applied, reversed cymbal crashes (volume swell effects in general), delay, and my personal favorite- that thing that softens the attack of the guitar (I'm guessing envelope generator.) ala the guitar solo in Rush's "La Via Strangiatto."

Sometimes the most atmospheric/ambient things are compositional and not sound effects, etc. Pedal tones/drones are always a good place to start, ostinato figures, specific chord progressions (the oft-overused though effective VI-i).

[Synesthesia]

Everyone's advice is quite useful...especially the Audio Mulch suggestion and compositional advice. I'm interested in how other people go about creating their texture effects. For instance, maybe I'll start with 20 seconds of pink noise in CEP and filter it through flangers, delays, equalizers and stuff to make a sweeping wind sound that can be layered with, for another example, a heavily processed vocal line, or something. I'm just wondering how other people do things like this...what programs? What do you start out with? Samples of instruments, or voices, or musical passages? Softsynths? What kind?

I've written a couple songs that are designed to be very surreal in a melancholy, groovy kind of way (think Isis' "Weight" and other melodic post-rock if you've heard it, or anything in the jazzy-trip-hop-trance genre like Thievery Corporation's "Mirror Conspiracy," or even stuff like Floyd's "Speak to Me/Breathe"), but I feel that they need to be much denser. Just looking for different ways to expand my composition to something beyond just conventional "notes&chords". Most importantly, perhaps, I'd like to create this stuff on my own...not just cull stuff from ambient sample CD's, because I believe it's very much a part of my own composition.

Thanks again for participating in the discussion!
-Derrick

[applesmasher]

you definelty need a soft synth then. For just making sound effects, ive heard spectrasonics atomosphere is supposed to be real good. Its got about 3gb sounds and presets you can tweak.

[lost studios]

I love software synthesis!