Ambient Music’s Love Affair With Instrumental Sampling
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Whilst Ambient music might more commonly be associated with synths and effects processing when it comes to sound sources, instrumental sampling has a rich history nestled within the story of the genre itself.
Brian Eno is credited with coining the term ‘ambient’ as applied to music, using it in the liner notes to his seminal 1978 album Music For Airports. However, his first release of Ambient music arguably arrived 3 years earlier in the form of Discreet Music, the title track and A-side of which simply features two minimal synth patterns slowly repeating in and out of phase with one another.
The B-side of this album however, contains 3 purely orchestral works, all being variations on Pachelbel’s ubiquitous Canon in D Major. Whilst not strictly an example of instrument sampling in its purest sense, the act of recording instrumental performances and framing them in an Ambient context is the very essence of this half of the record, becoming something of a seed of a long and evolving tradition.
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Getting Up Close & Personal
On a personal level, probably my first introduction to Ambient music was hearing Stars Of The Lid’s 2001 masterpiece, The Tired Sounds Of in my late teens, a lush, sprawling double album that uses a mingling of effects processing and live instrumental recording more or less as its sole compositional ingredient.
This marrying of ideas from both the worlds of instrumental music, where rock bands and orchestras live, and electronic music, full of effects, cutting-edge processing and sound design, was a total revelation to me, forming a deep love that has only grown alongside my professional interests as a sound designer.
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Backing Out & Embracing The Blur
For myself and my colleagues here at ModeAudio, it feels like Ambient music ebbs and flows in our very veins and as we’re all seasoned instrumentalists to boot, this particular facet of Ambient music-making has held particular appeal since we first started making sounds over 10 years ago now.
The kind of blurry, buried instrumental tones that Stars Of The Lid especially have come to be known for have found their way into many ModeAudio packs, from the reverb-drenched vocals of Murmur and Northern Lights through to the guitar and orchestral drones found in 100 Drones and Evergreen.
One of our favourite sound design techniques in the pursuit of all things drone is to layer reverbs and use enveloping to fade in the sound in question; it’s amazing how gorgeously Ambient most instruments can sound when you simply hold a note and take the attack phase out of the equation!
Convolution reverb, making use of impulse response samples of spaces both real and imagined, is our weapon of choice here, from Logic Pro’s Space Designer through to Ableton Live’s Convolution Reverb Pro and particularly our very own Airspace effect plugin - these tools allow us to apply enveloping to the IR sample for achingly slow, gradual attacks, as well as changing their perceived size to really stretch things out into Ambient nirvana.
Increasing IR ‘size’ in convolution reverb tools has another knock-on effect; it darkens the sound, as the frequency content present in the sample gets shifted down the spectrum as the playback speed is slowed. This is an obvious boon to hazy, meditative and immersive music, which can be further controlled and capitalised upon with the help of a low pass filter.
Placing the filter before reverb offers a more natural, organic sound for my money rather than after, something that’s true of many effects placed prior to reverb in the effects chain. Reverb can act like a beautiful quilt or blanket when used in this way, cloaking sounds in subtle mystery, warmth and intrigue.
Hushed Yet Apparent
As well as the artists and albums mentioned above, another point on the Ambient continuum that has proven of particular inspiration to ModeAudio in recent years is that which reveals its aural sources just a little more transparently - for example, the great William Basinski’s recent collaborative album with Janek Schaefer, “…On Reflection” takes a more direct approach to instrumental recording, featuring interlocking layers of unadorned, twinkling piano motifs to heart-meltingly melancholic effect.
The loose, quiet and largely improvised feel of this album was a direct inspiration for some of the loops heard in our Fresh Air and Fabric packs, recorded here in my studio with my beloved Chappell upright piano, alongside Ambient drones and textures built from heavy reverb use and treated field recordings amongst other things.
Basinski and Shaefer’s work harks back to the minimal solo piano compositions of the great John Cage amongst others, such as the placid yet faintly haunting In A Landscape. Cage’s forward-thinking artistic philosophy has had a lasting influence on music-making today, as well as on a young Brian Eno, first finding his own voice in the world of recorded sound way back in 1975.
Whether you’re an experienced sound designer or just starting to explore the vast world of Ambient music, there’s no better way to dive in than by getting your hands on inspiring, immersive sound content. Check out the Evergreen - Orchestral Drone Loops sample pack by ModeAudio — packed with rich, atmospheric textures and evolving drones to elevate your next Ambient production.
This article was written by Niall McCallum, Co-Founder of ModeAudio.