The methodology of ambient
01 October, 2020
One of the challenges that working in a niche genre brings is a noticeable lack of learning materials. While one can easily find numerous and effective tutorials for progressive house, trance, hip-hop and pop music, none of this is available for something like ambient, a genre with its own rules and production techniques.
One thing to quickly address is the term "ambient". It's a very broad term, with static drone on the one end and "sad piano music" on the other. I am aiming for the modern electronic variety. Usually beatless textures, an intermix of minimal and so-called "new age music": artists like Steve Roach, Harold Budd, Stars of the Lid, and basically what you would hear on Drone Zone.
This article is a very brief reference of the main techniques. I have been producing ambient for over 15 years now, and I would like to share some tips and tricks. Unfortunately, in many cases I had to figure these out by myself, so I hope this reference might help other ambient artists.
Contact me if you would like more detail on any of these.
Do not treat ambient drone as a bunch of notes
We live in a culture that mostly treats music as melodies, aesthetically pleasing combinations of notes. This approach kept me back for years. Basically, I tried playing melodies or improvising over chords, but what I got sounded nothing like those gorgeous pad waves that you hear from masters of the genre.
The trick is to treat what you do as sound manipulation, not note manipulation.
This means seeing notes and melodies as simply the initial sound source, which is then to be manipulated. Your music should involve a lot of sound manipulation and your thinking should be primarily in that direction. Only then you will begin getting the results that you hear from other electronic ambient artists.
To learn more about sound music vs note music, please watch this talk.
Although ambient drone is primarily "sound music", or what I also call "sub-melodic music", it still uses notes. So, which notes/chords/scales should you use?
One of the hallmarks of ambient drone is its neutrality. Most ambient drone is neither major, nor minor in tone. This is achieved by either ommiting the triads or limiting oneself to a single chord. In case of the former, if you go for a C scale, you would play C, D, F, G, but not E or Eb. This will keep the sound neutral.
Using more complex chords, like suspended chords, is also a good idea. A lot of really interesting ambient can be done by using a simple chord as a basis, but then adding a lot of notes in between at much lower volume. These quiet notes would collectively give the chord a textural feel.
Because you are likely to overlay different parts of the recording in order to achieve a texture, you need to make sure that your chord changes are not creating unpleasant combinations. A method to ensure that everything you play matches is to use a pentatonic scale. It creates both a neutral tone and also allows you to combine any notes of the scale with each other.
Adding in a bit of dissonance can also be very interesting, so sometimes try experimenting with adding an out-of-scale note to your generation process.
Taking a piece of melodic content and applying DSP to it creates a texture. Below is a list of methods to create textures. Note that the most interesting results occur when several of these techniques are chained together.
- Aleatoric methods of triggering random notes. You can start by playing around with some of the tools I've created, but there are probably many tools out there that let you do the same.
- Phasing: play copies of a loop against each other, but change the loop length so that there is constant shifting. You can record yourself playing pad notes and then mix this recording into a thick texture by combining it against copies of itself in various permutations.
- 100% wet reverb with a long tail. Importantly, you don't need to apply that to pads only. You can apply it to almost anything and it will turn it into a pad. For instance, you can apply it to a sequence that changes its cutoff and get a pad with a nice movement. This track starts with an epic pad that goes in and out. It is actually based on a sequence that I play in the looper with a cutoff freq automation, and reverb turns that into this epic pad.
- Slow down recordings. Slowing down might be one of the first steps of your sound manipulation. Once this is done, you can apply other methods, such as reverb, on the slowed down sound. Avoid paulstretch. It's an overused tool and it gives out really characteristic artifacts that you can spot a mile away. Sometimes it works really well, but it's rare.
- Shimmer. This is the effect that Eno and Lanois came up with. Most major ambient artists use it. This is when the reverb signal is also pitch shifted. Has to be used carefully, you can easily overdo it, but when used properly it adds depth to your textures. Read more about it here.
- Volume envelope tail. Steve Roach mentioned somewhere that he uses volume envelopes with an almost endless tail, but I am not sure I understand this method and when I tried it, I ended up getting a mess. Maybe that's not what he meant, but I am listing it here as a method mentioned by the pioneer of the genre.
Ambient can be tricky to mix, because you are working with sounds that are slow and last longer. Therefore, any unwanted frequencies will become much more noticable. Resonating frequencies is a common problem.
My general philosophy is to fix problems as early in your process as possible. It's always easier to fix the source synth/sample, then it is to EQ everything after it was mixed together and amplified by those massive reverbs. My technique which I am calling with a clumsy name "Note taming" is based on that idea. And also less bass.
Ambient music is associated with contemplation, silence. This might veer you in the direction of trying to produce literally quiet music. But this is a mistake. The feeling of contemplation and silence is created through the type of sounds you are using, through the slowness of movement, not through the literal quietness of the mix!
If your mix does get quiet during production, which can happen for legitimate reasons, get into the habit of amplifying your mix early in the process, so that you can hear any imperfections that might creep in. It is common for a pad to sound perfect at low volumes, only to begin exhibiting problematic frequencies once amplified.
Below I list several methods that can help you improve your sound.
- Mind the reverb. Reverb is one of your main tools, but it will also multiply the original sound, thus enhancing unwanted frequencies too. Make sure to apply EQ before it hits the reverb: this will give you more control and make EQing easier. Any EQ applied after reverb should only be done in broad strokes. If you are forced to cut frequencies out after reverb, something is wrong.
- Louigi's Note Taming. Play a single pad note and then EQ it to perfection: this is usually very easy to do for a single note. Then play the note for a bit and render the result. Then load it into a sampler. You will have a perfect pad, since all the other notes will now sound perfectly too. If necessary, you can repeat this for several notes, although you'd be surprised how well it works even with one note. The downside here is that this might make the pad a bit bland, so you might not want to use it for all the instruments in your track. The technique, however, works especially well for low pads, which are easy to overdo in ambient drone. Note taming significantly restrains low pads and makes them very pleasant.
- Use high quality reverb. High quality reverb algorithms take care of resonating frequencies and can completely change the quality of your mix without you having to do anything. Valhalla products are the ones I can personally recommend.
- Slow down the whole mix. Once you are mostly done with the track, render it with all the effects applied, and then open it in a separate project as an audio track. Try slowing it down by several semitones. Your goal is to find a semitone that makes the track sound cleaner and softer. You will always be able to find a sweet spot, which, in my experience, is usually 3-4 semitones down. And note, I am talking about actual slowing down, not pitch scaling. Then finish the mix by using this new slowed down file. I apply this trick to pads only. You can then apply percussion and field recordings on top of that, if necessary.