Ambient Synthesis
Whether you’re creating a majestic work of meditative ambience or an atmospheric pad for the breakdown of your club banger, we’re here to teach all you need to know
Most features on ambient music creation tend to begin by making reference to Brian Eno’s early definition of ambient as music that “must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting”
AS ONE OF the originators of the genre, at least in its electronic form, it’s hard to argue with Eno’s suggestion, but several decades on, this definition feels a little narrow.
The various offshoots of ambient music can perform often contradictory functions – it can be beautiful and meditative but also abrasive and ominous, it can be incredibly simplistic or detailed and complex. In the case of the ambient strains of techno that first emerged in the ’90s, it can even be danceable.
In terms of sound design, ‘ambient’ elements aren’t merely the preserve of ambient music either. Ambient or atmospheric synth sounds can be found in cinematic scores, underpinning the performances of modern jazz, filling out the arrangements of pop tracks or in the breakdowns of otherwise hard-hitting club tracks.
However, you intend to use your sounds, there’s a lot that can be learned from the process of designing sounds for ambient music.
AMBIENT INGREDIENTS
Creating synth patches specifically for ambient music – or ones designed to play a background role in a track – is a slightly different process to designing leads or basses. While other synth patches are often crafted to make themselves known, perhaps through punchy attack stages, bold oscillator choices or bouncy resonant filter sweeps, ambient patches are intended to settle into the background. They should be soft and unhurried, generally making use of slow attack and release envelopes and gentle filtering to remove bright and harsh characteristics. It’s a mistake, however, to confuse this softness for simplicity.
In compositional terms, ambient music is often relatively simple and very slow paced. Progressions often consist of little more than two or three very drawn out chords, or in the case of drones, just a single note extended throughout an entire composition. The interest, then, comes not from changes in harmony, but in timbre. The real key to creating ambient synth sound lies in slow and subtle movement – not so much wild vibrato but gradual shifts in the tonality of a sound. Creating modulation routings and oscillator relationships that mean that new overtones rise and fade as a sound sustains, and subtle shifts in pitch and frequency that turn a simple chord into a ‘soundscape’.
DIGITAL VS ANALOGUE
Which is better – analogue or digital synthesis? It’s a debate that rages throughou
