How to Ambient Music without BORING everyone

[Music] when I discovered the world of modern ambient music my honest first thought was oh that seems pretty easy I can do that there really didn't seem to be a lot going on either harmonically or melodically which were the main points of focus for me as a composer up until that point so as anyone would I grabbed a slow evolving pad in serum threw some black hole Reverb on it and uh just drowned it entirely and you know that actually sounded pretty good to me so I was like well I'll just make some stuff with these sounds and I'll be an ambient artist then I tried to add another layer to that and then another one and of course everyone was equally drowned in Reverb on an insert of course and within the span of about 2 minutes I had completely ruined it it sounded like an absolute blurry mess hm maybe there's more to this than I thought I only really discovered this Loosely defined genre called ambient music about a decade ago late to the party I know I had been pretty intensely focused on my studies as a classical pianist organist and composer but I had also grown up on progressive rock thanks Dad there was one band in particular that I really loved and stood out from all of the rest to me they had this ability to not only shred and clearly they were all vir Osos with their instruments but they could also kind of get the listener lost in this bed of ethereal textures from time to time when they would slow things down and pull things back there were all these weird sounds coming and going that I had no idea how they were even making that band was called yes and thinking back on it I guess yes was my first exposure to anything remotely resembling ambient music even if it was usually tucked away in a 20-minute Rock Epic [Music] fast forward to about 10 years ago and I was exposed to artists like olaer Arnolds and Nils FR that kind of reignited my passion for synthesizers and all of these electronic instruments that they were using they had this nostalgic vintage tape sound going on that I found to be really creative and much more accessible than the tape music I had been exposed to up until that point which was in the art music world of the more Avant guard so from there I naturally thought well who else is making music in this kind of style and I discovered other ambient artists like hammock and slow Meadow and my good friend now Tony Anderson who has been a guest on this channel a couple of times and I remember very specifically sitting in my crappy little first studio trying to hear what I could over the traffic noise outside and being really struck by the sounds that they were using the depth of their mixes all all of these incredible textures that again I had no idea how they were achieving it seemed three-dimensional when I was listening to it all of these seemingly very different textures fit together really well and it remained a mystery to me despite me trying to make it inside of Cubase until I started using some Hardware eventually I tracked things all the way back to the source Brian Eno who is largely considered to be the father of ambient music and Eno was using hard Ware tape machines synthesizers out of necessity that's kind of all there was back then and it forced him to be creative within a set of limitations what you need are fewer possibilities that are more interesting um you know the whole emphasis of synthesize a design has been towards giving you more and more options it's not more options that you want it's more useful options now I don't have any Hardware to sell you today I don't review gear anymore and I really don't think you need Hardware to make any kind of music anymore but for me I did need that experience with Hardware early on just to fully wrap my brain around how a piece of gear can inspire you through its [Music] [Applause] limitations [Applause] [Music] using Hardware totally changed the way I thought about making electronic music in general as a Pianist and organist I really appreciated the ability to be more Hands-On with an instrument and actually reach out and grab things when I was in the box I had this sterile environment and seemingly unlimited choices and that just just overwhelmed me and everything kind of sounded the same I wasn't very inspired because there was no inherent character to any of the things that I was using in the box or at least I didn't know how to get character out of anything that I was using in the Box this is what kids today and probably some 32-year-old in the comment section would call a skill issue and in my case that's completely accurate though a bit uninspired as an insult at this point but something happened after I started using hardware and was forced into these limitations I then understood how to implement those limitations inside a Daw as well and that's the whole point of me bringing it up I'm not trying to sell you a synth here I'm trying to show you how to skip that step if you don't have any hardware of your own and maybe you can start to make more interesting things in the box that you'll find inspiring to use let me show you an example when I got into Euro I was really intrigued by the amount of inspiration I could find just in playing with a simple clock [Music] divider [Music] [Laughter] and I had never experienced anything like that in the software world nothing so Hands-On direct and relatively simple that actually unlocked a whole world of possibilities for me now I do similar things in Ableton with this Ableton Live device which by the way I highly recommend commend though I'm not sponsored by [Music] [Music] them overall I've started to create maybe more simple elements and I don't mean uninteresting elements I mean elements that are maybe in mono so that I can layer them more e easily and they don't blur together maybe elements that are bandpassed so that once again when I stack them in layers everything feels like it has its specific place to live this is one of the most important things in making the kind of sound beds and textures that I find the most interesting but of course I cannot completely ignore the 25 years of classical training that I've had and to me the real Challenge and the real fun is finding interesting ways of combining those two worlds the interesting sounds from ambient music and maybe the more interesting harmonic and melodic ideas from the classical more traditional world I think there are a lot of time tested Concepts that have stood the test of time for centuries that we can apply to any genre and still get a lot of use out of and oddly enough if you use these older Concepts in new ways suddenly your music sounds fresh and interesting because other people aren't doing that most people spend their time chasing whatever is trendy right now without fully realizing that those are probably also the things that will be forgotten by tomorrow if you'd like to know more about the specifics of the things that I found most helpful musically I have a free ebook that will walk you through those Concepts that are my favorites and that I use in my own music that's Linked In the description below the OG ambient Godfather himself Eno said that ambient music should be as ignorable as it is interesting for a long time I didn't fully understand that because it's never been a personal goal of mine to write ignorable music but the way I've come to interpret that is that there's plenty of unexplored space within the world of ambient music it can be used to create incredibly Beautiful Textures that will transport The Listener without them having to focus on it too intently it's just beautiful but it can also have another level to it of depth and craft for those active listeners who want to peel back those layers and I think that initial emotional weight that this kind of music can carry pulls The Listener in and that sort of depth and memorability keeps the listener there and that's exactly the kind of thing that I want to create with my own music so I think the very best ambient music is deceptively simple the key is not to let the hidden complexities become a distraction and that is a skill that goes far beyond just slapping some Reverb on your favorite syn or field recording if you'd like to support my ability to make more videos I don't do sponsorships on this channel but you can click the little join button down below and buy me a cup of coffee every month I would truly appreciate it thanks as always for watching and I'll see you next [Music] time

Channel: Jameson Nathan Jones

Views: 51,589

Keywords: ambient music, music composition, how to make ambient music, ambient music is easy, electronic ambient, music theory, ambient music for studying, ambient music for sleep, ambient music tutorial, brian eno ambient music, getting started in ambient music, jameson nathan jones, jameson nathan jones ambient, history of ambient music

Id: v11TzDYmarQ

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024