Ambient Piece

When composing this ambient piece, my main hurdle was surprisingly the time constraint. The time for this song was requested to be longer than 90 seconds but shorter than 150 seconds, which for ambient music is pretty short. I've made some ambient pieces before, and generally my process involves very slowly introducing elements which eventually build into a large soundscape. So my first thought was to hasten this by causing the build to happen much faster. However, I found that this strategy (in my personal opinion) makes the track almost less ambient in a way. It's not an easy thing to explain but I feel that rushing an ambient piece into the ambience actually makes the ambience feel less important. I see ambient music as the atmosphere that is created when melding strong noises together to almost form additional tones, similar to how dissonances in traditional music create a sort of middle tone. And to that same respect, rushing this aspect results in a more melodic affect rather than ambient. And as a result I found that the solution to this would actually be to make the piece much more stripped back. 

My track only uses three sounds, one of which is only used to reinforce another. The first of which to be played is the primary pad synth. This was also the first of the sounds I made, and it was to be the primary tone used in the song.

Here I used a basic saw wave for the pad, in fact, every sound in the song is based on a the sawtooth. For the warm pad-like sound I cutout the high end with a lowpass filter. I also very slightly adjusted the attack of the sound so that it would not start immediately when activated.

The second sound that I made is the main pluck. I set out making this sound to be akin to that of a piano, and while that specific timbre isn't replicated, I believe it works perfectly for what I had in mind. To make the pluck motion, I once again adjusted the attack slightly as to not be so aggressive when played, but I removed all sustain to make it imitate the staccato of a piano. 

I did also meddle with the effects rack, since that how I typically go about with my sound design. You can see below that I added some delay to add an echo whenever the sound played as well as some reverb to help reinforce that effect. The filter is set to a random preset which I thought sounded cool. The distortion is actually very present in the sound, to the extent that if more than one note is played at once there will be an overdrive effect. This effect isn't used all that much though, and the effect really just serves more to boost the volume of the sound.

The final sound is also the least audible. I didn't change anything from the default settings in the actual synthesizer. 

All of my changes are done through the external effects rack. This functions the same as if I were to add effects in the synth, but I was unable to add my external plugins to the synth itself. Below you can see what I added. I could have applied the EQ and Reverb to the internal effects rack but since I was already going to add the other plugins I decided it would be easier to work with if everything was in the same place. What these plugins actually accomplish are very minimal, and mostly serve to be the contrasting bass frequency of the primary pad. This isn't meant to be heard on its own, but it adds a significant timbral difference when present. I added intentional dissonances to, as I described earlier, add sort of additional tones that I thought may work in the context of the ambience.  

The final thing I want to mention is this effect automation at the end of the piece. This was completely unintentional; I recorded the notes with a keyboard, but when I record note input it also records automation, which I forgot to disable before I messed around with the effects. This resulted in a really cool low hum at the very end of the piece which I think gives it a great sense of finality that I hadn't quite added myself beforehand.