Interested in discovering the mechanics of an ambient piece of music?
The sustained ambient sound which fades in at the start is actually a sample from Augustus Pablo's - East of the River Nile. It's actually two notes played simultaneously (Piano and Bass). I fed them into a software instrument called 'Time Freezer'. Time Freezer is like a sampler, only, it's a granular sampler.
Granular synthesis/sampling for those of you who aren't familiar basically involves splitting a sample into segments of between 1 to 50 ms in length. VERY short they are. These small pieces are called grains. Multiple grains may be layered on top of each other all playing at different speed, phase and volume. The resultant sound is a fairly easily recognisable one. It has a distinct characteristic.
Anyway, after feeding it into Time Freezer I EQ'd it, cutting out a lot of the lower frequencies and some mid/high range. I then ran it through a reverb.
The second sound to come which sounds a little reminscent of a submerged vocal sound is actually a synthesizer. Native Instruments Absynth, to be precise. It's an incredibly powerful synthesizer which offers a hell of a lot of options and flexibility for complex sound sculpting.
Lastly there's a Flute sample in there with some reverb, EQ'ing and delay. Through out the track I tweaked EQ settings on the tracks and added some subtle flanging in spots as well as a few other minor effects.
The sustained ambient sound which fades in at the start is actually a sample from Augustus Pablo's - East of the River Nile. It's actually two notes played simultaneously (Piano and Bass). I fed them into a software instrument called 'Time Freezer'. Time Freezer is like a sampler, only, it's a granular sampler.
Granular synthesis/sampling for those of you who aren't familiar basically involves splitting a sample into segments of between 1 to 50 ms in length. VERY short they are. These small pieces are called grains. Multiple grains may be layered on top of each other all playing at different speed, phase and volume. The resultant sound is a fairly easily recognisable one. It has a distinct characteristic.
Anyway, after feeding it into Time Freezer I EQ'd it, cutting out a lot of the lower frequencies and some mid/high range. I then ran it through a reverb.
The second sound to come which sounds a little reminscent of a submerged vocal sound is actually a synthesizer. Native Instruments Absynth, to be precise. It's an incredibly powerful synthesizer which offers a hell of a lot of options and flexibility for complex sound sculpting.
Lastly there's a Flute sample in there with some reverb, EQ'ing and delay. Through out the track I tweaked EQ settings on the tracks and added some subtle flanging in spots as well as a few other minor effects.
