You can find ambient sounds like running water, wind, light traffic, rain, and other white noise to loop in the background. There are countless reverb VSTs available. This is one of the greatest free VSTs in general. Reverb plugins can cost a silly amount of money for the best out there. Buying Waves plugins is a humorously inefficient process. 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.
When it comes to writing original ambient music, your starting point depends on your music theory level. If you are a true novice, try learning some major chords.
Use your DAWs piano roll to draw in a progression of sustained major chords that repeats. Play around until you find a sequence of chords you like. There are no right answers in music- if it sounds good, it is good.
Try repeating the chord progression times, and gradually weave other instruments and sound effects on top. If you balance your sounds properly, this will be on its way to a complete ambient song! Try copying some of the melodies or chord progressions, but play them on ambient instruments with a much slower tempo. This could also give you a starting point to create an ambient soundscape. Generally, when you write ambient music, arrangement is important. But when melodies do come, they tend to be slow, repetitive, and rhythmically simple.
Keep things simple, light, and airy. The music exists not to create a new feeling, but to nurture natural feelings, to enhance an environment without detracting from it.
Effective ambient music must be balanced, modest, yet secretly powerful. To immerse yourself in great ambient music, to imitate what you like, and to deeply listen to your own creations. Have fun, and feel the joy of the music! Listen The best way to get started is always to surround yourself with great influences. What Makes Music Ambient Ambient music tends to have a few elements in common. Warmth You can follow this guideline with your ears, or you can use a spectrum analyzer and EQ if you want to get more scientific.
How is it different from most other types of music? Well, like all music, ambient music comes in many different flavors. But even so, you should start with some general guidelines. In most styles of music, you have something that is directing the focus of the listener. Like a melody, riff or hook of some kind. Well, in ambient music, you want to avoid sharp hooks. In fact, you want to avoid anything that is sharp in any aspect at all.
Basically ambient music should not have any strong focus. Ambient music is more about creating a dreamlike world, and dreams have a cloud-like and unfocused aspect to them. As a composer of ambient music, your mission is to create an atmosphere, a landscape of sounds. You have learned how to get into an ambient music mindset. Tempo meaning BPM as well as the rhythmic patterns in your compositions, is what decides the fundamental energy level of music. Ambient music is in the lower range of tempos.
I usually start by setting the BPM somewhere in the range. If you want a very dreamy soundscape landscape you can go even lower with the tempo. The lower you go, the more ambient and cloudy the music will be. Rhythm is the very essence of energy and action in music. So by using fewer but longer notes, and minimize the sense of rhythm, you will create a more ambient vibe.
Ambient music should not draw too much attention to itself. If your track has drums, you'll probably want to pan these around the centre, but with synths and effects you can afford to use the space more creatively, so try panning them around. Most DAWs have simple pan controls that only enable you to pick one position in the stereo panorama.
To add a natural stereo panorama to mono samples, you could do a lot worse than give Voxengo Stereo Touch a try. This effect uses a delay algorithm to create a convincing stereo effect that's guaranteed to revitalise any dodgy old mono sounds you might have lying around. Reverb is one of the most important tools you have for creating a sense of space, so if you're making ambient music, it pays to take the time to get it as sweet as you can. A good start is to use a high quality reverb - Ambience isn't just free, it's one of the best reverb plug-ins out there.
It can be tempting to just stick reverb on a few tracks and leave it at that, but that wouldn't be using this powerful effect to its full potential. Using high damping values, large room sizes and long reverb times will create a big sound that, when combined with judicious EQ, can create a 'far away' kind of effect.
When using reverbs, if you want to create a softer, more ethereal effect, use less of the dry signal in the output. If you'd rather have a brighter, closer effect, then make the reverb's damping less severe, reduce the room size and turn down the delay time.
This works especially well in conjunction with stereo enhancer effects such as the Voxengo Stereo Touch plug-in. Many interesting effects can be created by rendering out reverb and delay tails minus the original dry sound, then applying creative processing to the tail. Filters work particularly well for this kind of thing and, once processed, the new sound can be played back alongside the original version, or replace it altogether.
Finally, when programming synth patches, don't discount the creative potential of your instrument's reverb section. Then adding a slow rotary speaker emulation afterwards makes a useful alternative to chorus or phasing.
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. You can hear this technique at play on some of the Cydonia Collective tracks. 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.
While Jeff Beck might get this right To create the doubling effect you can hear there, I simply layered the guitar part with an un-pitch-corrected copy of itself, delayed by around 30ms, and then added band-limited tape delay, as discussed earlier. 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. Such reverbs often produce fairly low-density tails which sound too crunchy on drums but can sound lovely on guitar.
Roll off some low end from the reverb to stop the overall sound becoming too muddy and, if the plug-in allows you to add gentle modulation, that can also make for a richer-sounding result.
The trick is to add enough reverb it really can be quite long to create the right sense of space and distance but not so much that your mix descends into mud. Generous smatterings of such reverb can also flatter piano invariably played with the sustain pedal down and flute. Used on acoustic or clean electric guitars it adds an almost string-like sheen. 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.
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.
The bass parts I usually end up using are warm and simple, with a fair amount of repetition; they underpin the track without demanding too much attention. The sound generally comes from a bass guitar or, as in the example, a simple bass synth that can produce TBstyle sounds. For the demo tune, I used a simple mono synth followed by a phase distortion plug-in to lend it a little FM-like complexity.
For this piece, I simply added a little overdrive to an Apple drum loop and then applied top-cut filtering to soften the overall effect. Layering a long percussion loop an odd number of bars in length over a basic drum loop can also often maintain interest.
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