Creating ambience

[Sinewav]

I like to play around with different ways to create different sounds for ambient music. Sometimes the sound I need is as simple as a high attack, high release pad, but other times I'll get creative and record wine glasses or have my brother play cello through unorthidox guitar effects.

Does anyone have any tips or tricks that they could share about creating ambience? Of particular intrest to me right now would be guitar effects, but anything from synths to silverware is fair game.

[OverCoat]

Sometimes I record stuff I hear in ads on the internet, like that sample I use in the second track on my last album [37 MB lol get the whole thing plx], or long speeches, etc.

The great thing about ambient sounds is that you can record whatever the fuck you want to record, then process it to death to make it fit your song as it changes. It all depends on what you want to hear right at that moment.

I'll tell you what's good for soundscapes? Check this out:

http://www.hgf-synthesizer.de/se/STS/STS.html

[Jens Wulvik]

The thing is to be creative with putting in different instrumenst and sounds. It can be anything 'cause everything gets ambient when you add lots of reverb and some delay. And to get the mysteric feel try to use some

interesting scales.

[Splunkle]

Linky to a computer music article on atmosphere.

I've tried a few of the things in there out - most of them are neat, if nothing unique.

As for tricks of my own, well, that depends on what sort of ambiance one is going for. Generally, people mean that huge verb + filter sound, but its much bigger than that. Or at least, thats what wikipedia tells me.

Anyways, I would say the most important think I have learned is too keep varying up the sound. Since ambient music often has an extremely slow moving melody (or whatever you want to call the progression of notes), I think it is important to keep the sounds changing so that it doesn't become repeditive and boring. Also, try to mix up different ways of doing this - LFO's, automation are the main two ways, but you can also do peak contol, bizzare keyboard mapping, whacky pan-o-matic stuff and all sorts of bizzare stuff. Experiment. Curiousity For The Win.

[Chavous]

The great thing about ambient sounds is that you can record whatever the fuck you want to record, then process it to death to make it fit your song as it changes.

Sometimes all I do is take a sample, open the mixer and just add effect after effect until it sounds cool.

Yup.

[suzumebachi]

before my hard drive (and mic) took a shit, i had a large collection of random stuff i recorded. everything from microwaves and washing machines running to rain hitting the window in my bedroom and shit like that. it wouldn't be hard to do the same to get some cool ambience effects. hell the recording quality doesn't even have to be that great. you could probably even use one of them handy little minidisc or digital voice recorders to do it. once you got that done you can process the recordings however you'd like so they fit in your mix.

since i don't have those recordings anymore, however, i just cram together as many ambient pads and stuff from various VSTis and shit as i can and process them as one jumble of crud.

speaking of unorthidox guitar effects, i've been able to get some pretty wicked sounds out of my MXR Blue Box.

[Legion303]

Of particular intrest to me right now would be guitar effects

Take the back panel off a guitar with a floating tremolo bridge and hit the springs with various objects while your guitar is amped and run through some delay.

-steve

[sgx]

A lot of the stuff you'll hear in my tracks (especially Lofi Attitude) is me doing weird junk like this:

I make long reverbs and delays on aux busses. I put phasers and distortions on them. I have a lot of the instruments in the songs sending to these reverbs and delays. In ACID, the bussing will let you solo the aux busses, so I can hear what those channels sound like without hearing any of the dry signal (I guess you could just put this stuff on your instruments as insert effects at 100% wet too, but that could be annoying).

I play the song and if I hear anything cool in the aux busses, I just select a loop section and bounce that audio to wav and it is inserted right into my project. Now I have a nice clip of ambient sounding junk I can move around and put anywhere. I often put more effects on it and also even send that audio clip back into the aux reverb and delay busses from whence it came . I also do stuff like reversing the audio clip and pitching it down an octave or two can make some interesting sounds also.

[zylance]

Of particular intrest to me right now would be guitar effects

Take the back panel off a guitar with a floating tremolo bridge and hit the springs with various objects while your guitar is amped and run through some delay.

-steve

Open a piano and mess with the strings.

[Legion303]

Open a piano and mess with the strings.

Yes! Mangled pianos rule!

Another thing I wanted to try but never did: find someplace with lots of wind in the fall months and iron posts with chains attached to them (the place I had in mind was on a horse ranch). That gets you some nice and spooky random clanking noises.

-steve

[Compyfox]

You know what's spooky?

A marshalling yard or container station from your local transport agency (trains). If you're like 2 blocks away (or behind the small woods nearby this area) rather than up close, and nobody is nearby or cars are moving - this can create some really spooky ambiences that can even compete with Spectrasonics "Distorted Reality".