What makes ambient music

Notice how much more vast the one with reverb sounds. The sound of the kick the boom effect really adds impact to the background. Most ambient music incorporates delay in one form or the other. The echoing effect it creates gives a feeling of being in a large space. Here in this example, I applied a dotted delay with a feedback of around seventy percent to a gliding sine wave. As you can hear it creates a nice effect of repeating itself while slowly getting softer.

A great way to create atmosphere is to slow down the tempo. We are going for a feeling of calmness and relaxation. Adding white noise is a great way to add atmosphere and variety to any ambient track.

A lot of people listen to ambient soundtracks when they want to relax, so white noise fits very well with this type of music. White noise also helps add even more texture. The more subtle noises and sounds you got going on in the background, the more depth the composition is going to have.

You can use any instruments you want when crating ambient music. Ambient music is more about how the instruments are played and the type of effects you add. That said there are certain instruments that are better at creating ambience than others.

Atmospheric pads and keyboards are often the cornerstone of most ambient tracks. Creating your own synths and pads is also a lot of fun. There are many great software synthesizers out there. At the end of the day ambient music is all about creating atmosphere and sense of space. You want the music to feel otherworldly and mysterious. Following some of these tips can help achieve making your ambient music more interesting and dynamic.

Video games are known for having amazing soundtracks. Music For Airports proposed a new way of approaching music, not as something to whistle or sing along to, but to be gently consumed by. Attached to the record was a short essay by Eno that laid out the groundwork for this approach:. Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

Specifically, his ideas on accommodating the varied listening states we each bring to our musical encounters have flourished and allowed ambient to become a music of lived moments. Each time you encounter a piece of ambient music, it shifts and alters ever so subtly as the sounds around you merge with it. Similarly, our capacities to listen and focus or not focus greatly affect our encounters with it.

It is by no means exhaustive: plenty of other records have been equally influential, genre-expanding and commercially successful. A good pair of neutral studio monitors or headphones is absolutely crucial. Imagine trying to work on a painting while wearing smudged glasses.

These programs play the role of tape machine, and as a host for sampled instruments, synthesizers, and audio processing effects. Different DAWs shine in different contexts, but broadly speaking, they can mostly do what all the rest can.

Ambient music tends to favor certain kinds of synth or sampled instruments. Pads, and especially warm pads are extremely popular. Pads resemble swelling orchestral chords, but usually have a more muted and less textured quality.

Warm pads in particular are essentially swelling low-mid frequencies, and can be used as individual notes or to play chords. Many ambient tracks use pads in the forefront of the arrangement.

Other popular sampled instruments include piano and electric pianos, acoustic guitar, chimes, world instruments like pan flutes and thumb pianos, and mellow synths. Most DAWs come with their own proprietary instrument libraries, but they are usually limited. Supplement your soundscapes with sounds from free sound effect libraries such as Freesound.

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! But what makes Ambient? Ambient Music is defined by Wikepedia as:. From Deepintense :. Atmospheric — Environmental — Mood Inducing — Music.

This style of music is characteristically undefinable because it incorporates so many different styles, sounds, and moods. However it can be recognized as being atmospheric in nature. The sounds work together to create a space where sound becomes the encompassing theme, mood and character of the immediate environment.

According to many sources: the term ambient music was first used by the ambient music legend Brian Eno. I would also highly recommend reading the Wikepedia article and perusing the Deepintense site, as they go through the History of Ambient music from the early 20 th Century to the present, and provide several examples along the way, as well as further reading. And one other note about genres. Bobby DeVito wrote an excellent essay on this.