I was on the Spanish coast for a week and recorded soft rain falling on the sea, with binaural microphones that sit on my ears. Back at the laptop I built a track around that one recording. It ended up with four channels, and the thing is full. This video is about why that works.
In this video:
- Why I record foley at all
- The binaural recording by itself (put on headphones)
- A talk with Ameeva about what nature does to the way you make music
- The Ableton session, element by element
- Why I master ambient around minus 20 LUFS
Why a field recording is the base of the track
What I love about foley recordings is that they give you the base of the track. They fill a lot of frequencies, and a lot of different dynamics appear by themselves. Even when you only record textures you get transients and things happening. If you tried to build that, it would be very complex. You would need a lot of LFOs and things to randomize. The recording is a storyteller already, just with its volume.
When you have the ocean in the background, you have so many frequencies that you get forced to use less elements. That is what brings this more minimalistic music. With my ambient I always try to give nature the main spot, and then have some appearances of elements from the computer or from the machines. Nature and technology in a kind of symbiosis of frequencies.
The four channels
- The rain. I loop the recording and check that the loop start is not obvious. The rain dropped heavy at some points, so I compress those peaks a little. Then I cut the bass, because the ocean has a lot of rumbling. Nothing more. I like to keep the audio as real as it was.
- The sampler chords. A sampler that plays two chords in different timings and speeds. Two LFOs move the faders, so the layers phase each other in and out and it stays alive. Valhalla Supermassive on top to make it wet, and Slink Filter as a mixing tool, to space it out into a warm noisy drone.
- The granular layer. A full track in a granular engine, with the position modulated in steps, smoothed, and a bit of jitter. So it is random but kind of controlled. Then Tape Fiasco, a delay, and Slink Filter again.
- A texture from my MacBook mic. Something random from daily life, just for texture, with the grain size up.
If I put much more in, the mix would be full. One element goes away, gives the stage to nature again, and comes back. It builds more like classical music, with a lot of variation between the quiet and the loud parts.
Mastering quiet
I know it is very quiet. For ambient I check that the master is around minus 20 LUFS, like classical music, to keep the silence. I mixed and mastered for techno for a long time, and that is one field where you can become good, but it is not the full spectrum. For ambient I don't care that much about what the streaming platforms do with loudness.
What I used
- Sonic Presence SP15 USB-C spatial microphone: sonicpresence.com
- Ableton Live
- Tape Fiasco by Jonas Eriksson: erikssonjonas.com
- Valhalla Supermassive
- Slink Filter, made by Michel Iseneld of Hypnus Records and Dorisburg: Slink Pack (affiliate link, if you buy through it I get a small cut, you pay nothing extra)
Ameeva makes rooms to listen to. His channel: ameeva on YouTube
The music in the video is from my album Mycelium.