Question for ambient music gurus.

[JeffSanders]

So many of you create some incredible ambient music. (Fitch, Vurt, Kriminal, dburgen etc.)

Since I write tunes on guitar, it seems so foreign to me when I hear ambient music of how in the world it is "written"...it's abstract at times, but each song has a signature motif.

Do you normally just start with a drone and riff off that...or start with almost classical pieces and timestretch/filter/delay them into low, drone-like soundscapes?

How does everyone personally go about this style? Maybe it's just in the blood?

[vurt]

for me personally if im playing with a synth and a patch grabs me,its just happens from there as a natural progression i guess.
on odd occassions i do sit down to write a track in which case i will usually try to paint abstract thoughts in my head with sound until again something just takes off

a lot of it is experiments with simple sounds too, i often get inspired running field recordings through fx,there are so many different fx available that if i had to i think i could make do for the rest of my life with maybe half hours worth of audio to play with and then mangle
but luckily i got shit loads of audio and im always finding more so i doubt i will ever run out of inspiration

[Amberience]

My stuff is sorta concept driven. I'll think of a movie or a book, or even just a make believe scene in my head. From there I'll try to capture the atmosphere of whatever inspired me to do it.

I don't bother too much with whether things sound sonically acceptable - panning balancing, lack of clipping, aliasing etc..

I just go for it.

[dburgan]

How does everyone personally go about this style? Maybe it's just in the blood?

It's definitely in the blood to an extent, in that it requires great patience to do good ambient. I'm still struggling myself trying to get to that zen-like point where the ambient flows effortlessly. I'll probably never get there.

From a process standpoint, I'd have to say no two pieces are done the same way. For me, though, it always ends up being centered around what I call the "ambient hook", which is some kind of common element that defines the piece. It could be a riff, or a particular sound element, or a particular chord sequence, or really anything at all. The key is that the ambient hook holds the piece together and the rest of the piece evolves around it. At least that's how mine end up happening a lot of the time.

Of course a lot of my ambient stuff nowadays is done live, which brings a whole different dynamic to it.

The bottom line is: there are no rules. Don't seek them in the ambient realm; they won't be of use to you. Instead seek to quiet your mind and find that place of patience and peacefulness, then let the music flow from there. That's the theory anyway ...

[cloudspine]

In my case, it almost always starts as an "improvisation" of sorts, that is, the beginning is a single designed sound or a synth patch, and the entire process just unfolds naturally.

However, I do sometimes, rarely that is, start with a clear concept in my head, but I always end up in a completely different place...

[emdot_ambient]

for me personally if im playing with a synth and a patch grabs me,its just happens from there as a natural progression...

Ditto. Almost all my songs begin with an exploration of a synth. I troll through the presets or work on creating a new one, find something that inspires a musical passage, and then build a song around it.

Perfect examples of this in my work (at the link in my sig) are Behrlinesque, Tempera Loop, Aeolian Planes. I think all 3 of these pretty much begin with the sound/pattern that inspired the song.

It would be completely foreign to me to begin an ambient track with a melody/rhythm/bass line in mind. I've done that with dance music and, as in this month's contribution to the KVR competition, in a rock song. But ambient music is all about mood and, well, just sound. So, to me coming at it from a structural point of view would be counterproductive. I think it's best to approach ambient music from the intuitive and emotional reactionary path. That can be done with guitars, too. Fripp's work with Eno are excellent examples of that approach.