I’ve been lurking for quite some time now and, well, hello! I was wondering if any musically inclined dopers have a good way to create ambient, rich, textural sounds. Such as: what keyboards they might use or pedals or recording techniques, etc. Thanks!
I’ve used what I call the digital taffy method (pull sounds until it mixes well and tastes good). Put a sound in a editor. Doesn’t matter what it is. I’ve had best luck with something simple and tonal. Say bashing a dinner plate with a spoon.
Take that sound and slow it down by two octaves. Take the same sound and do a time expand on it - say twice as long. Overlay this sound over the slowed down one. now you’ve got two notes playing at different speeds. Keep going and modding these sounds. If you pitch adjust keep it within a chord (full up/down, fifths, thirds, etc).
Layer the sounds, repeat them, reverse them, add effects, and layer, layer, layer.
You can come up with really nice washes of tones using this method.
I discovered this method when I was commissioned to write music for a stage play. In one scene they wanted “sounds that oozed but had no real structure”. I tried to create something on synths but it had too much structure. I started pushing and pulling sounds around in Sound Forge intending to create samples. I started to layer the sounds and figured I was on the right track. I did some wide stereo separation on some sounds, places some in extreme lefts/rights, and some in center mono. It worked really well and filled the entire theatre in a warm wash on tones.
If you go to this page and check out “Aurallelogram”, “Insomnophobia” or “Borderland” - they were made using the above methods (you can preview short clips)