Dark Ambient recording techniques?

[shamann]

Yeah, it's like everyone in metal circles now going on and on about how Stephen O'Malley invented drone music all by himself.

I read a magazine (rockarolla or something) that suggested pretty much that exact thing. In a thing about the Sunn O))) and Boris collab, talked about the album as the ultimate/end of drone. Seems they are missing the point some.

[dystonia_ek]

Archon Satani

http://www.coldspring.co.uk/artists/archon-satani.php

Agreed, if you're talking about Mikael Stavostrand's solo recordings under that name - the early stuff seems to wallow in the cartoon satanism just a wee bit excessively. The last three Inanna recordings ('Storm I-III', 'Not.hing', 'Signal.or.minimal') are really excellent too.

[dystonia_ek]

Yeah, it's like everyone in metal circles now going on and on about how Stephen O'Malley invented drone music all by himself.

I read a magazine (rockarolla or something) that suggested pretty much that exact thing. In a thing about the Sunn O))) and Boris collab, talked about the album as the ultimate/end of drone. Seems they are missing the point some.

Somehow I doubt David Jackman and Phill Niblock and Lamonte Young are shaking in their boots right now.

[Sickle]

Seriously, though, the best thing for anyone to do is just whatever you like the sound of - learn by doing. Don't let anyone steer you into some sort of box.

One of the things that distinguishes Sickle's stuff, for example, is that he comes from a background in a different area of music completely. As a result he approaches his 'ambient' material without any of the preconceptions that plague many artists who are totally genre-conscious about what they do.

Yeah, I guess that helps me to a large extent. It still helps me in that even after persuing it, I rarely listen to anyone else's works in this genre or whatever it's called when I'm not indulging peers here or at the Auditorium, so I have no clue what the competition's up to. To be honest, I'm not really even sure who the competition might even be said to be..

'dark ambient' (horrible term, hated it when it first started to get bandied about at the beginning of the 90's and it still grates now)

It really is an awful term. The first few times I'd heard, I actually thought it was a joke. "It's like ambient, but with leather trousers and velvet capes."

Ouch. I never knew wtf to call my shit. What am I supposed to call it, then? In this context, my outsider POV to genre reveals itself disctinctly. The term's employed by me as a lazy quicky description, ie: Dark Ambient = Mooshy Unpleasantness



Seriously though, I guess I could weigh in heavily on this thread in several ways.

From start to end, Sickle's 'Dark Ambient' Formula:

1st requirement: Depression, Anger, Grief.


In my real works that weren't test outputs for Reaktor devices I was learning to build, every serious track was predicated on the above. This process is cathartic 100% for me. It's helped me avoid my own drug relapses, suicidal inclinations, and probably even murder. Through a great neccessity, I learned a few years back through making this kind of 'music' I was able to marginally diffuse the emotional burden of overwhelming things in my life like my wife's addiction problems, deaths, and other frustrations in my life large and small I was powerless to affect. From the beginning it was a form of therapy for me, where the process of creation was more important than how it was recieved. That I was able to find a temporary emotional release from these things and find it enjoyed (or whatever it actually is, I dunno) by others was a humbling side-effect.

I don't create with the intention of rocking out an audience, I'm doing the mental equivelant to lancing a cyst.

For me, without a prerequisite state of malcontent, I fail to see how someone could effectively produce the material at all. If a Happy Person tried to sell me on the shit, I'd laugh in his/her face, so you gotta be miserable to be convincing, but again, that's just for me and what I do, and I could very well have misinterpreted the entire dark ambient genre and what it's supposed to sound like, but I do not seek to emulate anyways.

2nd requirement: Avoid Cross-Contamination of track content and method

Yes, I've discovered my own tendancies to be formulaic, and I don't like it much. With intentions of combating this, I induce periods of lapse where I deliberately step back and as a consequence, relearn, or rediscover techniques, hopefully in a different way. Sometimes this happens on it's own as life occurances cause sufficient disruption to induce that state on it's own, as has happened this last year. I don't apply a sense of discipline; I'm much to disorganized mentally to maintain that, so I apply a sense of blind inspiration to composing, in that I don't set out with a specific purpose or sound, I let that manifest itself. The only direct intent in composing for me is conveying the emotional state I'm in at the time.

3nd requirement: Reaktor and/or eXT

These are the tools I use. In the approach I take, there's not much difference between them in that I build in eXT's main window the same way I build in Reaktor, or the approach and results are nearly identical to the point where it's really acedemic which one I use.

There is virtually zero sequencing in any of my tracks, and if you were to open a Sickle eXT project file (and usually there isn't one left afterwards as I record my tracks in a live approach for the most part without saving; you can't re-enter a photograph and you can't re-enter my productions), what you'd have is something that behaves like an auto-ambient Reaktor ensemble that has been built to order. I mainly use aleatoric midi note generators, but ones in which constraints exist to take the randomnality and force it to tolerances I desire. For VST users, you can check out xoxos' 'Diner' VSTi, which is the commercial version of something built by him for me to spec, and is freely available last I checked. A Reaktor equivelant is meLodion, but I personally use a polyphonic version I modified. Using either in this context requires practice and a familiarity with the instruments less you find yourself in a flood of garbage notes that are of no value.

Extending this to parameter modulation, obviously without a true sequencing enviornment I do not harness traditional automation. Highly defined random algorithms again come to the rescue for the most part, but I occassionally employ LFO's when static repetition is called for. The best LFO plug I've used is NicFit's CC_mod_dev, and should be available on Soma's midi plugs page last I checked. Especially in eXT's modular window, I prefer using a secondary LFO plug to an instrument/fx's built-in ones as obviously, one LFO plug could easily be sent to multiple instruments. Another interesting method is employing multiple LFO's, as was achieved in a new(ish) unreleased rachmiel algorith I concepted with him building, which was essentially a twisted sine array with a midi output. NicFit has something similar but greatly expanded on called Control Front in VST.

For the most part, with modulation (and note generation), less is more. By this I mean you don't want mod amounts anywhere near 100%, and you want things like LFO speeds slow as molasses for the most part. Say for instance, you have 3 audio generators. You have them sent to a mixer. You don't want all three running all at once, you want an organic sounding flow that blends them into one another. You can do this on the fly (I do when I feel like it), or you can assign something non-linear to take the recognition factor of a pattern out of the listener's zone of comprehension by using a randomising algorithm or even an LFO that has it's own parameters modulated by other LFOs.

In Reaktor, ultimate control in a performance shows it's advantages over eXT for one main reason:

I decide what's on my screen when I'm performing/recording. This means that I can have 9 ensembles on screen, but after deciding what parameters will be affected during the recording, all others are hidden from view, alleviating visual clutter and a need to double click in eXT's main window popping open VST windows that are immediately required then switching to another, something that can generate clicks on my system. I have visual control over not only active parameters, but controls for modulating sources and disabling options for when I want or need to take over manually.

4th requirement: Effects and signal chain

In my own productions, I tend not to deviate much from my choice of effects, and the usual suspects are tremolo, distortion, delay, and reverb, with multi-band compression used either during a performance if CPU permits, or applied afterwards in Audition. Audition deserves a mention for it's use in mastering or occassionally crossfading seperate recordings, which I tend to avoid these days using a machine that can handle recording most of my contraptions in a single shot. In most recordings, I employ a different delay effect for each audio generator, sometimes different reverbs, but this is always glued at the end by a master verb no matter if it's mix is only 10% to avoid any complete fracturing in sonic content. I usually *always* apply multi-band compression (I use FlatBlaster almost exclusively) as the last stage in the signal chain after the reverb.

Also, instead of using eXT's rather horrid master out recorder, I use TapeIt 2, a very handy tool I recommend to anyone/everyone.

I rarely feel a need use to EQ in a post-recording stage, but when I do, it's to the master track (usually the only track) in Audition using it's built-in Parametric EQ.

The note-bending recognizable in most of my tracks is achieved by another xoxos plug I commissioned him to build. There's also a Reaktor equivelant I later built myself.

5th requirement: Time, or the lack thereof

Simply stated, if it can't be established fluidly and I find myself struggling against the process, there's no point in pushing it any further at that time, so the project is abandoned. Nearly every track I've shared here has been completed in under 2 hours or less, usually less. I usually don't preselect the instruments I use and cook without a recipe grabbing them at random as I don't keep a massive collection of synths that are unproven for me. I'll start mostly with an instrument's existing preset and tweak it from there instead of setting all instrument values to default. There's just too many instruments/ensembles with too many good existing presets for elitist shite, so I don't waste my time with that, especially when most synths/samplers I employ will be buried under a wall of delay/verb anyways.
__________________________________

I guess that covers most of it. Cool thread; I found it by accident as I'm not subscribed to this forum section. I hope what I've said here helps somebody in some way.

cheers,
D

[PTV]

That was an interesting reading!
Thanks Sickle

[shamann]

'dark ambient' (horrible term, hated it when it first started to get bandied about at the beginning of the 90's and it still grates now)

It really is an awful term. The first few times I'd heard, I actually thought it was a joke. "It's like ambient, but with leather trousers and velvet capes."

Ouch. I never knew wtf to call my shit. What am I supposed to call it, then?

I don't know, but then, maybe you're into leather trousers and velvet capes?



I think the name has stuck now, so no sense worrying about it especially, just that it was kind of a silly name from the outset, much like IDM.

The rest was an interesting read.

[Sickle]

'dark ambient' (horrible term, hated it when it first started to get bandied about at the beginning of the 90's and it still grates now)

It really is an awful term. The first few times I'd heard, I actually thought it was a joke. "It's like ambient, but with leather trousers and velvet capes."

Ouch. I never knew wtf to call my shit. What am I supposed to call it, then?

I don't know, but then, maybe you're into leather trousers and velvet capes?

Nope, not really..

[whyterabbyt]

The difficult part is separating one's self from all the dark ambient (and other ambient styles) that's come before and might be an influence. Not being genre-conscious is hard to do because the attraction to the genre is already there.

Not always. Very little of what I listen to falls under this genre, except for stuff by a few people here at KVR. In fact I was describing what I did as 'dark ambient' as an attempt to differentiate myself from the 'twee' association of what people expect of ambient long before I knew it was a genre.

[whyterabbyt]

Surely Robert Rich & B. Lustmord - Stalker is as dark ambient as it gets?

No, not really. But its okay in itself.

[whyterabbyt]

Focussing more on the OP's question, I guess you've really got to determine what you mean by 'dark ambient' before committing to a 'methodology'. Like I already said, I use the term to differentiate from something else (other ambient) rather than as an indicator of specific genre, and my use of 'ambient' in the first place is very specific; the connotation of 'ambience' as it relects an effectively passive exposure to an 'environment' or even 'landscape'.

Having spent a lot of time thinking about it (as a result of conversations with some of my peers here at KVR, a few of whom are already in this thread), 'landscape' is probably the defining crux of my 'philosophy' of composition. The mechanisms are secondary to building a sense of place, or rather places; ostensibly a set of locations or fixtures and a travelling between them. It probably sounds more pretentious than it is, though. Its a means of thinking about the structure of a piece in a way that I can work from, and as far as that goes, its provided me with a decent framework that suits my working habits.

The construction of 'signifiers' for those locations, and the 'discovery' of the territory that lies between them is often what drives the 'why' of the choice I make in what to build a piece from. The 'composition' itself is, often,primarily intuitive; I know my tools, and I spend a lot of time just 'playing' with them, so I let my instincts lead when it comes to processing et.c. And very specifically, I prefer to work as much as possible from 'live' takes of audio or MIDI tracks, although Im far from an instrumentalist. Once Ive recorded a track, I'll cut it into pieces, and a very large part of the base composition will be derived from that. Sometimes I'll add new tracks, but very little has more than three or four 'source' tracks, and most have only one or two. In that manner I keep a sort of organic cohesion between the parts, no matter how they get transformed later. Often I'll spend a day or two 'preparing' for that single live take, just working out a set of sounds that hang together, before recording it (in one sitting), and then not go back to it until at least a few days later to actually use.

And they do get transformed. I often do a lot of processing, and I use a lot of software to do it. But I use a chorus to 'thicken' sounds, a short reverb to 'smear' them, a long reverb to move them outwards, a flanger to 'hollow' them. Im not as concerned with how things 'should' sound or should be used, as how they actually do right there and then as I'm doing it. I reach for effects readily as a means of shaping a given piece of material into a new form that 'fits', and I'll readily spend a decent amount of time add to and change the effects change for a single clip to get it sounding right. Not too long, these days, though; fuss is an enemy.

I work a lot with Sonar, and also Project5, because their looping tools let me sketch out a structure very simply, and add and work into them. I tend to then work up the fundamental (ie lengthiest/most prominent) parts of a piece before 'filling in' the more dynamic events in the space between, working from the start and end in towards the 'middle'. But generally, I'll also work on only a very few tracks (or layers) at a time, and be 'mostly finished' with a group of layers before I start to work anything significant in the next set. In some cases, I may even build and rehearse the 'structure' live using Project5.

Finally, when I have my structure finalised, the last step is often mixing. Now, admittedly a very large part of the process up till now has been a sort of ongoing mix in situ, but there are usually some elements at least that I want to bring back a 'live' sense of movement to again. So I'll often rehearse a live mix several times before committing a final (automation) version into the system.

Passing Thoughts:

Artefacts (by-products) of processing are good. Consider using an effect for the artefacts.
Amp sims are as interesting for creating a sense of space as reverbs are
Time and pitch are there to be manipulated
Layering the same sound or effect multiple times accentuates the edges of
So does layering a sound with multiple effected version of itself
If it really doesnt fit, start again with something that does
Anything fits if you effect it enough.
Close your eyes when listening
Real-world sounds can be just as novel and interesting as the latest synths and effects.
How it 'works' together is more important than any structure, plan, philosophy, or method of how it should work.

[vespers75]

Sorry I haven't been able to respond this week, as my work sent me off on a training trip. Wow, there were alot of great responses in this thread, and I'm quite surprised that it's already went to four pages.

Firstly, I'd like to say that Sickle nailed it on the head.....Depression, Anger, and Grief. This kind of music has been a catharsis for me as well....no matter what the doctors try to tell you, meds alone are not enough to cope. Music has been a tool for releasing my demons for many, many years now....such as dealing with losing my 4 year old daughter (long story.)

Anyhow, I didn't originally come from any sort of "dark ambient" background either, as I had an interest in those sort of sounds long before I had ever heard of the "genre." In my youth I was into whatever kind of 'dark themed' music I could find, which eventually led me to playing in experimental 'metal' bands with death/black/doom/gothic styles. But it felt as if I could never find enough 'atmosphere' in that stuff to satisfy me. I gradually found myself prefering to listen to the 'instrumental soundscapes' that these bands used for intros/outros, filler tracks, etc. more so than listening to their actual songs. I would even make mix tapes of these interludes so that I could have what would be akin to listening to a whole album of 'dark atmosphere.' Shortly there after I quit playing in bands altogether and decided to pursue that direction in music....using synths, sound fx or whatever to create what it was I wanted to hear. So that is how it all began...

When I accidentally stumbled upon what was considered the "dark ambient" genre, I was pleasantly shocked that others had taken a similar path to mine, and that there might me a small number of people out there into this kind of stuff, whether as a musician, or merely listening to it. I am somewhat familiar with some of the more popular artists who pursue this path, though I rarely listen to other artists the produce this material, aside from here on KVR or once or twice a month I will listen to Aural Visions Radio on Live365.com. Mostly I listen to my own stuff, I guess.

As for my recordings, I will often use a sample of some sort and stretch it, detune it, throw IR responses on it, etc. etc. I will often do this until I get a selection of sounds I like, and assemble a track from these chunks of sound in a way that resonates with me. But one thing that is very inportant to me, is that the original sample has to have meaning for me, regardless of the end product. Perhaps I'll start out with a voice sample....maybe it was the phrase spoken that held meaning for me, or maybe the person who spoke the sample was someone who was close to me, or something like that. Maybe a sound was recorded in a special location where an event in my life happened. It varies, but the meaning just has to be there for me. Of course, in the end no one can really tell where the source sounds come from at all most of the time. Usually though, when I arrange the track, the arrangements often have a sort of meaning to me as well, aren't really that random. Sometimes even...say...the number of times a certain sound appears in a track may have some sort of personal relevance. For example, the 'subject matter' in my mind may be related to when something happened...say I was inspired by an event on April 6. I might have a certain sound appear 4 times in a track, as April is the 4th month, and another sound might appear 6 times in the same track...sort of a hidden way for me to incorporate a significant date into the soundscape. If I decide to incorporate any melody into a track, one trick I'll use is this: take a sample that holds meaning, perhaps a loved one saying a certain word....time stretch the hell out of it...making a 5 second sound become, say a minute long. This stretches the sound out so far that it produces a fairly steady tone for some time. Add various effects and processing to this tone...maybe layer a few octaves of it on top of itself and below it to make it sound thick and give it presence. Then I'll take that sound and import into Sampletank 2, thus making a playable instrument with a sound that is uniquely yours. When it comes to music like this, I think the only rules are the ones you impose on yourself (which I kind of do in a sense).

Thanks to all of you who particiapted in this thread, as it makes really interesting reading. I hope the things I revealed about how I tend to compose might help some others out, or perhaps open a door to new ideas of your own. You guys are great.

[Sickle]

Thanks to all of you who particiapted in this thread, as it makes really interesting reading. I hope the things I revealed about how I tend to compose might help some others out, or perhaps open a door to new ideas of your own. You guys are great.

Cheers, man, you and I share alot of common ground.

Seems the majority of us use samples and time stretching techniques. I messed with that early on a few times but never adapted a working approach I incorporated into my gestalt, instead I work with pitchshifters alot. Maybe I should set aside some time to experiment with it some more again.

It maybe of interest in passing to share that the way I developed my approach was almost 100% due to a driver conflicts that left my Radium 61 essentially useless with my soundcard (1212m at the time). Instead of choosing either copious and frustrating onscreen midi programming/automation editing and/or getting a different external controller, I turned to Reaktor and algorithms to side-step the problem entirely and never looked back. My keyboard sat unused for almost 2 years until I traded it with dburgan last year and it hasn't been replaced. I have Kore and it's harware controller, but haven't begun remotely utilizing it aside from testing for [edit: nevermind].

[napalmbob]

Wow. There's alot to be learned if someone wants to learn it. I feel inspired. Or it's the post christmas hollow again...

[mayan]

Sickle...excellent explanation of your music. Thanks. Great reading. Ditto for vesper. And dystonia...your original post was hysterical. Thanks. This has morphed into a really interesting thread.

[[ xerocreep ]]

Interesting read here.