1. How To Make Dark Ambient Music Download

Inspired by the likes of Philip Glass and Brian Eno, ambient music is as much about creating mood as it is creating melody.

With the availability of synthesizers, samplers, and electronic effects, drone music has progressed into different directions. Dark ambient, minimal, shoegaze, dub techno, doom metal, and even the more experimental ends of rock and pop now incorporate elements of drone. What would you use to create ambient/drone/dark ambient type music? Paul Stretch is the go-to tool for Ambient. You can make a fairly complex short loop usually.

How To Make Dark Ambient Music Download

Fortunately, computer users can now call upon an arsenal of ambient-friendly production tools - MusicRadar is here to explain what they are and how to use them.

1. If all the soft sounds and smooth vibes get a little too much, try some juxtaposition. Ambient heroes The Orb are fond of this technique, and whether it's a squealing guitar, devastating synth hit or ridiculous vocal sample, they're not afraid to toss something a little unusual into the mix.

2. Getting off-the-wall sounds doesn't have to involve spending hundreds on sample downloads and libraries - there are plenty of interesting sounds happening all around us all the time. If you've got a mic and a laptop - or any portable recorder - take a field trip and record some of nature's bounty. Running water's always good for a laugh, but remember: your equipment should stay dry, even if you don't…

3. Second-hand record shops are great places to find sounds. You may even find that your local charity shop has an untapped collection of oddities just waiting to be snapped up by the enterprising samplist. From records featuring nothing but steam engine noises to children's story albums, there's an abundance of weirdness out there for the taking.

4. Samples are a constant source of inspiration, but it's easy to discount one because it doesn't fit the feel of your track when you first try it. If you're short on fresh ideas, try running short bursts of a sample through a delay effect. Using this method, it's possible to come up with some great abstract noises that sound nothing like the original source material.

5. If your tracks are jam-packed full of synthetic-sounding virtual instrument patches and everything's starting to sound too 'computery', consider bringing in some natural sounds or using a few real instrument parts. Even if they're from ROMplers, it should help take some of the unnatural edge off.

6. Recordings of natural sounds such as rainfall, waves, wind and fire are great for filling out a mix because they're basically noise, and as such, they have a wide range of frequencies. They shouldn't be too loud or they'll overpower the mix, but use them with care and they can be extremely useful.

7. Noise is a useful synthesis tool - if your synth features a noise oscillator, you can use it with a fast-attack amplitude envelope to create your own percussion sounds. This sounds artificial, but in a lo-fi way, and works especially well when teamed with a high-quality reverb.

8. If you're using long, sustained sounds, such as pads, your mix can lack movement if these elements are too static. By subtly altering tuning, pulse width or filter cutoff over time, you can create more organic sounds that will enhance the mix rather than make it sound lifeless.

'Recordings of natural sounds such as rainfall, waves, wind and fire are great for filling out a mix because they're basically noise'

9. If you've got a sample that you want to play for longer than its duration, you have two basic options: you could timestretch it, which will most likely introduce unwanted audio artifacts, or loop it. Crossfade looping is the best way to get seamless loops, but if this isn't possible, you can recreate the effect yourself by fading between two audio tracks in your mixer.

10. To make a pad sound particularly evocative, try modulating the filter cutoff with a shallow LFO as well as a big, sweeping envelope. This will give the sound a great deal of movement and works superbly when combined with a delay effect.

11. When working with vocals, you can have a lot of fun with pitchshifting. When pitching vocals around, it helps to use a plug-in with a formant control - this helps vocals retain their characteristics or, conversely, can be used to alter them radically. Check out Smoky Joe, a lo-fi formant processor.

12. With modern audio sequencers, it's easier than ever to cut up vocals and other rhythmic sounds in order to fit them in with the groove of your track. When cutting sounds up in your sequencer, remember to zoom in to make sure you're cutting the file at a point where the amplitude is zero - otherwise known as a 'zero crossing'.

13. When deploying your newly-sliced rhythmic samples, it's not always best to have your sequencer's snap control active. You might find that pulling samples forwards along the track a little makes them fit in better with the rest of the groove, and having the snap control turned off also makes programming human-sounding rhythms easier.

14. Silky bass guitar tones are a common sound in ambient dub, but if you don't have a real bass guitar to hand, you'll have some trouble getting the same smooth sound. Bass ROMplers such as Spectrasonics Trilogy and Bornemark's Broomstick Bass are your best bets for recreating this kind of thing.

15. Whether you're composing in stereo or surround, it's important to use the available panoramic space properly if you want to create a sense of size. 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.

16. Most DAWs have simple pan controls that only enable you to pick one position in the stereo panorama. If you're looking for slightly more control, a stereo imaging plug-in such as mda Image or BetaBugs Moneo can be used to control the position and filter setting of each channel or tweak them as a mid/side pair, respectively.

17. 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

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. When using reverbs, if you want to create a softer, more ethereal effect, use less of the dry signal in the output. You can do this by turning the wet/dry ratio up, or, if you're using a send effect, by setting it to pre-fader and turning the source channel's main volume level down.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. Finally, when programming synth patches, don't discount the creative potential of your instrument's reverb section. With a long, lush reverb, even the smallest synth squelches or blips can be turned into pleasingly tonal atmospheric effects. Of course, if your synth effects truly suck, you can always use a separate reverb or delay plug-in instead to create the same effects.

Delay

24. Delay is a pretty common effect in atmospheric music like ambient, but for ambient dub, a full-on feedback delay, such as Ohm Force's excellent OhmBoyz effect, is just the thing.

25. Dynamic use of feedback delay is useful for creating long, evolving rhythmic effects. By automating the feedback control on a delay plug-in, you can build to a crescendo or create weird rhythmic effects.

26. Getting that distinctive morphing dub delay effect can be done by adding either a filter or distortion component to the feedback loop - easily done in OhmBoyz, as it has both. If you're using a delay effect in Reaktor or another modular environment, you can add these elements yourself, though it's advisable to put a level limiter after them to ensure the feedback doesn't get out of control.

27. Delay effects work well before a reverb, though too much of either will swamp the mix. However, it's possible to tame these effects with automation - set the reverb's wet level to 0%, automating it so that it comes up as the end of the delay tail is playing. This way, you'll be able to use both the delay and the reverb, without having too much of either going on at once. As an advanced alternative, you could use sidechain compression to duck the start of the reverb (using the source signal as the key input), and setting the release time appropriately, thus achieving the same effect automatically.

We're always looking for new ways to imbue our sounds with life and movement; for example, on the macro level, we might add live instruments to otherwise tightly programmed pieces, bringing back that 'human element'. And on the micro level, we often turn to less predictable, non-linear analogue emulation plugins to warm up 'cold', 'digital' sounds.

Such techniques and tools can make our music sound alive and organic as opposed to artificial and robotic, but we can also harness unpredictability to break away from the inherent compositional tendencies that subconsciously guide us all, to generate unique ideas and sounds from scratch.

Using the elements of chance and randomisation, we can get our computers to do the creative legwork for us within a specified range of variables and rules.

Ableton Live 9, used in conjunction with Max For Live's prefab devices, constitutes a powerful set of tools for MIDI programming, and includes some specialist utilities for randomising parameters within Live.

Although similar results can be achieved in some other DAWs, Live offers chaos-minded MIDI effects devices such as Random and MIDI LFO alongside 'micro' Random parameters on some of Live devices (Impulse and Collision, for example). It's fair to say that Live has more onboard, readily usable randomisation functions than any other DAW.

Below we show you how you can take advantage of Operator's functionality, along with Live's MIDI effects, to create generative, ambient drones.

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Step 1: Load an Operator synth into a new MIDI track in Live. Change the routing algorithm to two oscillators and two modulators by selecting the fourth algorithm (block diagram) from the right. In this mode, Oscillator B modulates Oscillator A, and Oscillator D modulates Oscillator C, giving us a good starting point for ambient drones. While you're at it, change the Voices parameter to 20.

Step 2: Select Oscillator A, and set its Envelope Attack to 5s and Release to 60s. Sine waves are a good bet for drone sounds using an FM synth like Operator, so set Oscillator A's Wave to Sine. Do the same for Oscillator C, then set its Attack and Release to similar settings to those of Oscillator A, its Coarse tuning to 5 and Level to -15.

Step 3: Now we have two Sine wave generators - one in the low frequency range and one higher up. Let's now program a generative note cluster. Create a one-bar MIDI clip and draw a short C2 note at the beginning of it.

Step 4: Let's shift this C2 note to a random pitch. Insert a Random MIDI plugin before Operator - it generates a random MIDI note pitch whenever it receives input. Raise the Chance parameter to 70% and Choices to 24. Now, 70% of the time, a random note up to 24 semitones higher than the input note will be generated.

Step 5: This is quite cool, but the random notes don't belong to any particular scale. To quantise the incoming notes to a scale, insert the Scale MIDI Effect between Random MIDI and Operator and load a preset - we've gone for Pentatonic in Black. Now when you play the clip, the result will be much more musical.

Step 6: Now we have our 'generative engine', but we need to stack the notes up over time to make an ambient drone. To do this, insert a Note Length plugin between the Random and Scale plugins and set the Length to 10s. This will hold the incoming notes for ten seconds. At this point, you might want to turn the track's level down to avoid clipping the master buss.

Step 7: For a more evocative sound, insert a Reverb after the Operator, set its Decay Time to 10s and Dry/Wet to 80%. In the Input Processing section, turn on the Lo Cut filter to prevent low frequency rumble. Now we have a suitably spacious base sound for our drone - let's randomly modulate it!

Step 8: So far we've not used Operator oscillators B and D, which are our FM modulators. Select Oscillator B and set its Wave to Square4. Insert an LFO MIDI device before the Operator, and set its Offset to -0.20, Rate to 3.00Hz, Depth to 5.00% and Smooth at 9 o'clock. Set the Type to Random and Map it to Oscillator B's Level parameter.

Step 9: Now we use the same technique for Oscillator D. Insert another LFO MIDI before the Operator. Set the Type to Random, Depth to 44.8%, Rate to 1.00Hz and Smooth halfway up. Watch haunted hathaways free. Map it to Oscillator D's Level. Play back the MIDI clip and enjoy some evolving ambient sounds!